


Honor Among Thieves

by RedwoodRRoad



Category: Glee
Genre: Detective Kurt Hummel, Glee AU, M/M, Multi, Thief Blaine Anderson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-07-29 00:23:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7662952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedwoodRRoad/pseuds/RedwoodRRoad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine Anderson comes from a long line of master thieves who kept all their secrets of stealing and sneaking in an ancient book. Anyone who read it would learn to become especially sneaky: which is why the Anderson family steals only from criminals. After all, there's no honor, no challenge, no fun stealing from ordinary people. You rip off a Master Criminal, then you know you're a Master Thief. On the night Blaine's older brother was supposed to inherit the book, three "visitors" came unannounced to their door. His father and mother fought to protect him and his brother, but they were overpowered: the book and many of their family treasures were taken from them. It led his parents to reevaluate their situation: it led them to leave the brothers alone for a while. A number of years later, Blaine has new allies, and together they plan to track down those who stole from them, avenge the untimely fate of his brother, and steal back the book and his family's other possessions. Blaine Anderson knew this would be the toughest test of his life: On this mission, he would either become a Master Thief like his ancestors before him, or fail and watch his family's name turn to <em>dust.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is something I've been working on for quite a long time, and I have a _lot_ of words right now, and it's not even half over. If you can't already tell, this is sort of going to be a mash-up of Glee and a video game I played as a child and still _love_ to this day called "Sly Cooper." Many of the events in each chapter will be somewhere between a direct reference to the game and a slight inspiration from the game. I should also mention that you're going to be seeing a _lot_ of characters from the show: Emma Pillsbury, Principal Figgins (I looked it up: his first name is _actually_ "Principal." The more you know.), Roz Washington, Shannon Beiste, Sue Sylvester, Will Schuester--and many others, _certainly._ You can expect to see just about every major character in this series, but they'll very possibly be on opposing sides of the law, even if they might have been close in the show. If you've played the game, I hope I've done some of these heists justice: if not, then maybe you and I can figure out if there really is Honor among Thieves.

            Orange, dim lights light the streets of Upper East Manhattan. It’s quiet: the kind of dead quiet even hooligans respect due mostly to the time itself. Only the truly nocturnal thrive during this time. The neighborhood was filled with rich, urban families trying to do their best despite or even at the expense of the unfortunate individuals whom can’t afford to live there.

            The light flickered.

            A figure appeared under the flickering light from almost nowhere. He looked down and shucked the backpack off his shoulder. With one hand, he opened the bag and opened it to the light. Jewels and pearls and other varieties of jewelry shone in the light. A bright grin emerged from under the half-mask.

            Re-zipping it, he tossed the bag over his shoulder and ventured back into the shadows.

++++

            Meanwhile, in a dimly lit office, a frustrated detective scours over information and data. Rubbing his eye, Kurt Hummel cursed tiredly. He packed up his work and started heading out. He heard a noise behind him. The window was slightly open. He was sure it was just wind or creaking in the building. He was too tired to care. Shaking his head, Kurt went through the door and locked his office before leaving.

            After a few seconds, the screen behind the window creaked and slid off. Gloved hands slipped under the window and began to lift it up. Once the opening was large enough, a half-masked man snuck through into the office room. As his feet noiselessly hit the floor, he looked over the newspapers and police reports on the messy desk. He saw names and faces and, most interestingly to him, a photograph on the corner of the desk. It seemed to be a family photo: a tall man with black hair wearing a sleepy smirk stood on the left, then a shorter, stout woman with a wide grin and short, reddish-brown hair stood next to him with her arm around him, then a man almost as tall as the first but much older, and balding, though still grinning with his arms around her and the man on his other side: a man who was considerably younger and of far fairer, nearly porcelain skin and brown hair the swooped beautifully above his glassy blue-green eyes. His small smile stretched pink, soft-looking lips. The man holding the photo suddenly felt weak-kneed as he gaped at how honestly _gorgeous_ the man on the right was. He would have continued staring shamelessly at the photo if he hadn’t heard the locked door being fiddled with. Panicking slightly, he ducked under the desk.

            Finally unlocking the door, Kurt stalked back into his office, annoyed mostly with himself. He stomped up to his desk and stepped behind it so he could grab a file from the filing cabinet in the corner. From underneath the desk, the man who didn’t belong there watched the other man in almost fearful silence. As the man turned around, the intruder managed to catch a glimpse of his face—and he almost gasped. He looked down at the photo, and his suspicion was confirmed. The head detective of this area was quite possibly _actually_ an angel.

            As he looked up again, the detective was leaving, now seeming like he would be leaving for good. Swallowing, the masked man peeked over the lip of the desk as the detective left through the front door again. He sat back down under the desk, holding the photograph in both hands in front of him. Pulling the mask up, Blaine smiled to himself, knowing he would eventually see the detective again. 

Three Years Later

            After much travel around the country and even the world, con artist and master criminal Blaine Anderson was back in New York under pure necessity. His family name was at stake, and through an incredible amount of help from his partners, he discovered that what he was looking for was all in New York. Treasures, heirlooms, historical documents, and more were in the hands of con artists worse than him. One of the only things standing in his way was the head detective of the Manhattan precinct: Kurt Hummel. As beautiful as he was to Blaine, he knew he would get in his way. Fortunately, Blaine enjoyed facing off against the detective. It was especially fun to be steps ahead of him and face off in close quarters.

            At that moment, through rafters and carefully-considered angles, Blaine peered down into Radio City Music Hall. It was near Christmas, so the Rockettes were on call. At the current moment, police officers scoured the stage after the last performance. Swinging his gaze over to the seating behind a pair of high-tech binoculars, he saw the famed detective speaking to the woman whose property was stolen: a pricey pearl bracelet with an engraved charm. Blaine could tell that the detective was convincing her he would get her jewelry back. Smiling to himself, Blaine tucked away his binoculars and dug into his leg pocket. Gently, he pulled out the very bracelet. He played with it between his fingers for a second as he peeked over the rafters again with a grin, ready to set up the situation for which he’s waited weeks to put together.

            Below, Detective Kurt Hummel sighed as he pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Looking up, he met the eyes of his Lieutenant brother across the way. “Finn!” He called, moving up to him. “Have you seen any sign of foul play here?”

            Finn Hudson looked unsure. “Uhh, we haven’t found anything yet. It seems like that lady just lost her bracelet to me.”

            Kurt shook his head. “No. She’s too connected to that bracelet. Someone had to have stolen it.”

            Finn scratched the back of his neck as he made a face of distaste. “Kurt, do you... _really_ think this matters? It seems like kind of a waste to put half the force on a lost bracelet…”

            “It’s not _lost_ , Finn! This is where it _starts!_ He starts small and gets to stealing from _museums_.” Finn made another face, having absolutely heard this speech before. “I’m sure this is the work of that _disgusting_ thief.” Kurt crossed his arms as he jutted his chin to the side.

            Finn inhaled, thinking. “Well…” he started, “I’ll put some people up in the rafters or something.” Kurt blinked, straightening up a little. “They’ll probably find some more clues.”

            Kurt looked up at him with a small smile. “Thanks, Finn,” he said softly. Finn gave him a smile in return.

            “No problem, little bro.” Kurt rolled his eyes and turned away, stalking off to the exit as Finn watched with a cheeky grin.

“I’m _older_ than you!” Kurt called without looking over his shoulder.

            Above the theatre, Blaine slid out of the secret entrance he had put together earlier that week, watching the street below him for the sign of the next part of this plan. In his ear, one of his partners yapped quickly to let him know what was happening around him. “ _He’s coming around the corner now—And believe me, as much as I don’t approve of this crazy-risky plan of yours, I’m still behind you all the way!”_

            He heard a snicker after that, and then another friend’s voice, “ _I bet you’d love a guy close behind you, Gay-nderson._ ” Another, softer, giggle followed as yet another voice cut in.

            “ _Leave him alone, guys. Blaine, we believe in you. Ignore Santana and get back to us safe, okay?_ ”

            Blaine smiled to himself as he caught sight of the man in question coming down the street. “No worries, Tina. I’ll be back before you know it.”

            “ _You better.”_

            Blaine licked his lips and watched the Commissioner of the police department approach the building—just as the detective came out. The Commissioner seemed upset. He crossed his arms, having been called for something so seemingly small.

            “I swear, sir, this is worth it,” Blaine gathered from their soft argument, “We’re so close to the truth—to this _criminal_ —“

            “Detective, you know I trust you more than anyone. I believe you when you say this serial thief is back in New York, but I can’t waste twenty officers on some girl’s bracelet she probably just lost—“

            “It’s not lost!” Kurt interrupted. Blaine couldn’t help but smile a little from how cute the man sounded when he was indignant. “I’m going to find this guy—I’m sure he’s the one who took the bracelet. When I find him, you’ll have the worst criminal behind bars, and you’ll be the Commissioner in charge when that happens,” he promised. Blaine’s smile turned into a grin when he realized his plan would work perfectly. The Commissioner still looked unsure, but he shrugged and entered the theatre. Puckering his lips a little, Blaine let out a sharp whistle. The detective whipped his head up just as Blaine ducked back, but Kurt saw the movement. Eyes wide, Kurt shot into the theatre.

            Pushing past other officers, Kurt all but flew into the staircase and headed up to the top. He slammed out onto the rooftop—to see the small bracelet sitting in the center of the small space of concrete. As he slowly approached it, he realized it was sitting on top of what looked like a black paper cutout of a bird. He knelt down, pulling out a tissue from his jacket, and carefully picked up the bracelet. Examining the minimalist cutout, he picked it up with his other hand and noticed a bit of writing on the other side:

_**Turn around, Beautiful.** _

            Hairs standing on his neck, Kurt whipped around to meet deep brown eyes almost a foot away, causing him to yelp with shock and step back a few feet. Blaine smirked, suitably masked from the nose-up and hair carefully hooded. Kurt flicked his eyes over the stranger’s figure.

            “You’re—You’re him. You’re—” He swallowed. “You’re the guy I’ve been—”

            Blaine interrupted him. “Looking for?”

            Kurt blinked but soon collected himself and rolled his shoulders back. “You’re under arrest,” he informed sternly.

            Blaine grinned toothily. “Am I? Are you sure?”

            Kurt shifted his jaw, eyes wide as he kept alert eyes on the criminal. He stepped forward slowly, but the nameless criminal stayed where he was.

            _Cocky_.

            Kurt squinted a little at the man before him. “Why are you… Did you really take this?” he asked, holding the bracelet in front of him.

            Blaine shrugged a shoulder. “You could say I like doing the right thing.”

            Kurt passed him a glare. “Yeah. Right. You could do the right thing right now and let me cuff you.”

            Grinning again, Blaine stepped forward, shaking his head. “Oh, honey, you’ll have to take me to dinner first before we get into the kinky stuff,” he flirted, throwing the detective a wink.

            Kurt flushed a deep red and reached for his gun. He held it up against the man before him. “Put your hands up.”

            Blaine blinked slowly and nodded a few times, putting his hands up by his head. “Alright, now you’re playing dirty,” he flirted again, still smiling as he spread his hands out in the air.

            Kurt blinked a few times as he approached the criminal slowly. “Turn around and put your hands behind your head,” he demanded.

            Blaine complied, nodding again and turning around, sliding his hands together behind his head. Kurt exhaled and stepped right up behind him, tucking his gun away and pulling out his handcuffs. He grabbed one gloved wrist and twisted it down, slapping a cuff onto it and eliciting a soft noise of interest from the criminal. The man looked over his shoulder, catching Kurt’s eye for half a moment. “Can I ask you something?”

            Kurt blinked and met his eyes again, pausing with the man’s other wrist in his. “What?”

            “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” he asked with what looked like a completely serious face.

            Blood rushed to Kurt’s face again as he stared wide-eyed at this man who had just said something he had never heard from _anyone_.

            “Wh-What?” he asked in almost a chirp. Before he could collect himself, Blaine contorted his entire body as he spun himself and Kurt around. Yelping again, Kurt’s body was suddenly encircled by the criminal’s arms, his hands locked in Blaine’s. In the midst of a short struggle, Blaine managed to slip his fingers into Kurt’s pocket and quickly pull out the key to the cuffs. Kurt squirmed, trying to kick out or whip his head back, but Blaine managed to evade everything Kurt tried to throw at him. “Let _go_ of me!!” he gritted, edging his elbows out as Blaine slid the empty cuff onto Kurt’s wrist and work on unlocking the other from his own hand.

            “I’m sorry, Sweetheart,” he whispered into Kurt’s ear as he finally got his cuff unlocked. Immediately, he moved it over Kurt’s wrist.

            “Don’t you fucking dare,” Kurt warned lowly, hunching over and attempting to look over his shoulder with icy eyes.

            Blaine gave him a pout. “I have to do this. I’m sorry, really,” he whispered again, clicking the cuff over Kurt’s wrist decidedly. He backed off from Kurt with the key still in his hand. Kurt worked to twist his hands around to more comfortable positions. Blaine rounded around him and dropped his hands into his pockets. Kurt, hair and eyes both wild, huffed as he whipped his eyes up to the thief again.

            “You could have just left!!” Kurt exclaimed.

            Blaine made a face, half agreeing. “Yeah, but I really wanted to meet you in person. Plus, I thought it was much weirder to stalk you, you know? Much weirder.” Kurt stared wildly at him. “But here,” Blaine continued, bringing the key to his face and stepping towards Kurt. Kurt immediately put his hands up to defend himself, but Blaine grabbed the chain between the cuffs, bringing his hands down again. “I’ll give you the key for free—Or, almost for free.” In his other hand, as he grinned, he put the key between his teeth and get his face close to Kurt’s. Kurt scoffed and looked away.

            “You’ve _got_ to be kidding,” Kurt scorned. The con man waggled his eyebrows expectantly. Kurt gave him a look like the man had lost his mind.

            Even so, he hated being one-upped in, like, five different ways in one day. Kurt needed to assert himself a little more today. In the span of one second, Kurt closed his eyes and slammed his lips into the other man’s—which, ironically, shocked Blaine as this beautiful man kissed his own salvation out of such a usually well-kept man. The kiss ended abruptly, and Kurt was smiling with the key now between _his_ lips, leaving Blaine weak-kneed and shaky.

            Kurt almost immediately brought his hands to his face and looked down to fumble with the key and lock. Blaine knew he had to work fast. He slid around behind Kurt, knowing that Kurt wouldn’t think to keep his eyes on him. As long as Kurt was looking down, Blaine had an escape. Kurt, however, definitely thought he was faster, though he began to grow more and more frustrated with how difficult it was to unlock himself. Once he did get it, he immediately dropped the cuffs and whipped around—To find himself completely alone on the rooftop. He stomped in frustration, seeing neither the thief nor the bracelet. Cursing, he brought his hand to his face to pinch his nose—though something cold and loose bumped the tip of his nose. Opening his eyes, he flicked his eyes to his arm.

            The pearl bracelet sat delicately on his wrist, propped by his jacket. Eyes wide, he stared at the piece of jewelry like it was a godsend. Even if he couldn’t capture the criminal, he did manage to get back his client’s property. Looking up and around again, Kurt tried to visually locate any sign of the thief— _Except_ —

            A small piece of paper sat on the ground. The same as before: the black bird cut out. It stood on its own now, propped up in the back like a small card. That’s exactly what it was: A calling card. Kurt knelt down to pick it up, expecting the worst this time. Slowly, he rose as he turned it over. Crossed out were the words from before, and written underneath them in a similar, sloppier handwriting,

_**See ya real soon, Detective.** _

            Chagrined, Kurt shook his head with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. Looking down at the card next to the bracelet, Kurt examined the black side. It shined slightly where the eye would be, though it was all the same shade of dark, nearly-black, grey. Kurt marveled at the simple beauty of it, though most of his staring resulted from the tingling in his lips. He lifted a hand to his face, touching his own lips and moving them against each other. It was a really good kiss, despite the circumstances, and for having not kissed anyone for at least three years.

            He rolled his eyes. “Don’t, Hummel,” he cursed to himself, “Don’t fall to that level. You’re so much better than that.”

            His thought process was interrupted suddenly when the exit door opened, and police officers started filing out. All were followed by the Commissioner, most of the officers combing the roof as the Commissioner himself went to Kurt. “Are you okay?” he asked gently, putting his hand on Kurt’s shoulder.

            Kurt nodded as he met his father’s eyes. He can never know. Coming back to himself, he slipped the bracelet off his hand and lifted it up along with the historically notable calling card. “It was him. I told you.”

            The Commissioner looked down at the bracelet, nodding and smiling proudly. “Nice job, Detective.” Kurt smiled, visibly basking in his small victory as he shifted his shoulders. The Commissioner gladly patted Kurt on the shoulder again and headed back down the exit stairs. Looking down at the bracelet and calling card in his hand, Kurt closed his fist just a bit, determined to one-up the legacy marked by con artists one-upping his own predecessors.

            Kurt Hummel _will_ be the one to put an Anderson in jail; he _swears_ it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After three years of being absent from New York, the gang is back and ready to search for the Anderson treasures. Their first major heist begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Backstory and Heist #1! Most of these chapters will be set around at least one major heist. Also, I would like to note that you've probably already seen "++++" between paragraphs. Imagine that as cutting to another perspective in the way TV shows or movies cut between perspectives with the use of a camera. I tried to make the cuts as fluid as possible, but this is the only way I can conceivably do so without possibly confusing the reader. Ignore them, but hopefully it helps the scene work the way I want! Enjoy!
> 
> Also, I mentioned that the chapters would jump in word length. There is a _lot_ to these heists, so I hope you don't get discouraged.

The Anderson Clan

_File 1: The Anderson Clan precedes history itself. It is unclear to historians how far this clan of professional con artists and thieves actually goes back, but they have tormented and eluded cities and countries around the world for generations. Fascinatingly, while some have been apprehended by police forces, none of them have stayed in custody for longer than three weeks. The shortest amount of time any Anderson has been in jail was 22 hours straight. The only piece of evidence that chronicles the entire history is, sadly, in the hands of the clan itself. The book is something that passes down the generations and whose pages are only seen by the family members themselves. Over time, some investigators have come across such pages in sparse variety. Currently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations in the United States of America collected a total of 13 pages out of, quite possible, dozens if not hundreds. Unfortunately, most of the pages have been reclaimed by unknown thieves, however it is beyond likely that the Clan itself was responsible for it. It has been admitted that only 3 of the original 13 remain in custody._

_As of this year, 2015, it can be assumed that at least 3 Andersons, give or take allies and non-blood relatives, live and perform their art of deception and thievery today._

_Wherever they are, it is highly unlikely they will ever be completely wiped from existence. They will always be present: whether we accept them or (possibly vainly), try to stop them._

++++

“Alright, here’s the deal.”

Wheeling around in his oddly complex-looking wheelchair, Artie Abrams cleared his throat as the others sat around the briefing table. He looked to one of his friends in particular. “Santana got us some pretty good recon on this bar: originally named, ‘Beiste’s Drinks’.”

“Well, _duh_ ,” Santana Lopez cut in. Artie ignored her comment and continued, turning to the others.

“Not only do Beiste’s guys have the pens originally owned by Soo Anderson, pictured here,” he pauses as the next slide shows a photo of six large feather pens mounted in glass and locked within a clear container. “But it’s also been discovered that the entire basement is a money printing rig.” He stops to show the next picture which shows the counterfeiting in action. The others listen closely. “If we can get back Blaine’s family things _and_ unveil the counterfeit scheme, we’ll essentially kill two terrible birds with one stone.” Artie turns around to the blonde girl. “Now. Brittany, we need you to get rid of the alarm systems so we can get in and out without being detected.” Brittany Pierce nodded slowly as she played with her ponytail. “You can take Santana with you to help you get inside, but Santana, we also need you to help Blaine figure out an efficient way in and out so that when game day comes, Blaine will have an easy out if things get hairy, so use your time wisely tonight—”

“I can do that!” Everyone turned to the last woman in the room. Tina Cohen-Chang swallowed as she looked around. “Sorry, that was… kind of loud…”

Artie frowned. “Tina, I sort of need you to help me hack the cameras so we can be Blaine’s eyes when he goes for the pens,” he informed.

Downtrodden but determined, Tina gaped a little. “Well I—I could still do that! But I…” She flicked her eyes to Blaine, whom gave her a sympathetic look. “… I think I could Blaine a hand so Santana can work with Brittany.” She flicked her eyes to the other women. “Be more efficient that way maybe?” She suggested.

Artie inhaled slowly and exhaled, rubbing his eye. “Uhh… Sure, whatever. Just—Make sure you stay with him. Don’t stray too much, alright?”

Tina nodded furiously. Blaine gave her a smile before he turned back to Artie, though Tina’s gaze and smile on Blaine lingered.

“Anyway,” Artie continued, “last but not least, as always: cops. They’re _going_ to recognize us if they see us, so stay out of trouble. Cops love to hang around bars to make sure no kids are drinking illegally, so _please_ watch out. I sort of doubt they’ll be around much—they don’t always scope out bars on regular nights—but stay on your toes. Blaine—” He glares at the (suddenly embarrassed from being singled out) man. “If you see that detective, you are _not allowed_ to make out with him.”

The others, except Tina, snicker. Blaine chews his tongue with a grin and a roll of his eyes. “I _doubt_ Kurt will be at this site. He’s _so_ innocent; I sort of doubt that cutie has ever _been_ in a bar.”

Artie pushes up his glasses with a disgusted noise. “Well either way: keep it in your pants this time, lover boy. That stunt you pulled in Times Square almost got _all of us_ thrown under.” Blaine dropped his gaze bashfully at the memory. “Alright, folks,” Artie continued, clapping his gloved hands together as he grinned at the others. “Get it done! Meet back here in three hours to check our progress!”

They broke and began to suit up for the missions. Santana and Brittany headed out first and took an underground system. Blaine and Tina took to the rooftops to get to the particular street faster. Once they made it a few shops away, Blaine parked himself behind a decorative roof wall and pulled out his binoculars. He zoomed in to identify the unkempt “Beiste’s Drinks” bar. Not many people seemed to be going into the bar, but then again, it was only about 3:00 in the afternoon. What struck him was a sudden influx of police officers walking up the street: the very thing Artie warned them about.

“Shit, guys,” Blaine whispered into his microphone. “It looks like we have some cops already busting the place, or—” He cut himself off as he zoomed in. He could hear a bit of what one of the cops was saying, but she was interrupted by a car door slamming across the street. Blaine swung his sights over to— _magically_ —Detective Hummel (in a gorgeous overcoat, he mentally added) approaching the officers sternly. Blaine could just barely make out the beautiful man’s demands as he pointed and motioned around the area. “Just our luck, kids. Detective Gorgeous just arrived.”

“ _Son of a bitch_ ,” Blaine heard Artie snap.

“ _Are you fucking serious?” Santana barked, her words broken up slightly. “You’d better not blow this for us, Anderson. In fact, if you do any blowing today on any of our enemies, I will personally castrate you._ ”

“Yikes,” Blaine responded. “Relax, guys,” he followed with a chuckle, “Careful, though, it looks like they’ve already got some suspicions about this place. I think Kurt’s telling some officers to keep watch outside. Santana, Brittany, watch out for Blues, alright?”

_"Alright, nerd.”_

_“Okie-dokey!”_

Blaine sighed as he let go of the transmitter button. Tina came up behind him and squatted. He continued to look down at the street. “I wonder what they’re setting up for,” Tina mumbled.

Blaine hummed and kept his eyes on Kurt. The detective looked around for a bit before turning his gaze to the skies. “Shit,” Blaine breathed, ducking and getting Tina to duck with him just as Kurt rounded his gaze up in his direction. Blaine waited for a moment before looking over the lip of the wall as Kurt started looking away. Relieved, he sighed and let his back rest on the wall. “We should probably move,” he suggested to Tina, “I’m sure there will be an opening on the other side of the bar.” He started packing his binoculars into his belt as he helped Tina up.

“Let’s do it,” she replied excitedly.

As they leapt off to find a better entrance, down on the street, Detective Hummel ventured into the bar. He looked around at some of the quiet drinkers before approaching the barman. “Is the owner here?” he asked the man. Pausing from cleaning the bar, he looked up. After a pause, the man dropped his cloth and headed through an entryway behind him. Kurt watched with slight fear that he wouldn’t be taken seriously in this setting. He knew he stood out. As he waited, he looked around, and the drinkers seemed to be a little quieter now that he was here.

Suddenly, a large woman with short, curly hair appeared from around the corner. “You called for the owner?” she asked gruffly.

“You’re Beiste?” Kurt asked, almost out of disbelief.

“Yes sir, Shannon Beiste.”

Kurt blinked. Believing her, he moved on. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the area around here?”

Shannon seemed cautious, but she agreed with a curt nod. “Sure. What do you need to know?”

“I need to know if you’ve seen any odd persons around here.”

“Odd persons?” She inquired.

“Suspicious persons. People who shouldn’t be around here.”

Beiste hummed in thought. “Not sure. Although, nights can get shifty on the weekdays.”

Kurt nodded. “What about thieves? Any break-ins or anything?”

Beiste frowned. “No, sir. Why?”

Kurt sighed. “Do you know anything about the Anderson Clan?”

++++

Meanwhile, behind the bar, Blaine and Tina wrenched open a door that seemed highly unused. Wiping her hands together, Tina turned to Blaine. He let her in first with a wave of his hand, and they stepped into a dark room. Almost immediately, Tina found a switch, and a dull, greenish light flickered on. “Spooky,” Blaine purred. Tina gave him a bemused look. He grinned at her.

The room itself was lined with shelves and filled with boxes. Blaine looked up: a ventilation shaft looked large enough for him to slide through. Tina wen to the other door in the room to check outside as Blaine climbed up.

She opened the door carefully after listening for an outside presence. Peering down the two hallways, she could just barely hear loud laughter from one side and dull chatter from the other. She clicked the door closed. “Can’t tell what’s going on out there,” she noted to Blaine as he began unscrewing the vent.

“That’s fine. I’ll take this through to find the basement and maybe a better way out,” he suggested.

Tina watching him nervously. “Uhh, what should I do?” she asked timidly.

Blaine looked down at her as he pulled the grate off. “Uhh,” he started slowly, moving his eyes around for a moment. He snapped suddenly and pointed at her. “Find the basement entrance. There might be a door that’s on the ground that leads into lower levels. Check for baddies and stuff and get back to me.”

Tina nodded and headed back out the exit. Carefully, Blaine hauled himself up into the ventilation shaft and put the grate back in place. As it turned out, the opening was smaller than the shaft itself. Blaine had slight room enough to be on his hands and knees, so he laid there for a moment to press his transmitter and call the crew. “Artie. Come in, Artie.”

++++

Back at the base, Artie snapped up from his examination of some of Santana’s photos. “What’s up?”

“ _I found the vents. Do you think you could give me an overhead?_ ”

Artie frowned and wheeled over to his computer. “Where’s Tina?” he asked as he pulled up a blueprint of the building.

 _"Tina's looking for a basement entrance_."

 _"I haven't found anything yet!"_  Tina cut in as Artie adjusted his ear piece, " _I'm thinking these buildings are all connected underground, so I think any entrance I find will get me to the basement of the bar anyway_."

"Just be careful, Tina," Artie warned, finally locating where Blaine was on his map.

++++

Meanwhile, Blaine kept his eyes ahead of him as he waited. " _Blaine, stay quiet. Don't break through the vents like an idiot._ "

"Do you think I'm an amateur?" Blaine chuckled. "I'll be fine. Just give me a hand with this, please."

" _One sec.”_

Blaine shifted his weight and began to crawl forward carefully as he heard Artie shifting around. He felt a pop in the transmission, making him jump a little.

" _Okay, we've got a direct line_ ," Blaine heard, a little clearer in his head. " _Right ahead, you'll want to turn left_."

"What's on the right?" Blaine asked, peering around the right corner.

" _The front of the bar. Don't go over there. It's quiet, and I'm pretty sure the police are checking with Beiste at this point_."

"Perfect," Blaine purred, heading right.

Artie sputtered. " _Blaine!! What are you doing??_ "

"Checking the front."

" _There's nothing there!! Death is there!!!_ Jail _is there!!_ "

"A beautiful boy is there."

" _Did I mention death and jail?!_ "

"Is jail worse than death?"

"Marginally _worse!! At least if you die, they won't be able to torture information about us from you!_ "

"Aww, I would never rat you guys out."

" _Blaine!!!_ " Artie screeched. Blaine chuckled softly as he found a grate with holes in it. Down below, he caught sight of Detective Hummel talking to Beiste. He strained to hear the two speak.

++++

"And you're sure about that?" Kurt asked warningly.

"Yes, sir. I wish there was some way I could help direct you, but I would definitely appreciate some extra protection outside."

"What about the sewers?"

++++

"Shit," Blaine mumbled. He immediately heard Artie start scrabbling, asking him what he heard. He shushed the man gently to hear more.

++++

"We can't be sure about the sewers, but they connect to the basement level. I don't know about how easy the entry might be."

"We'll check it out."

++++

Blaine cursed a few more times as he scrambled for the wide receiver button. "Santana, Brittany, get out of the sewers  _now_."

" _What?_ " Santana barked. " _We just got started busting up some sound systems!!"_

_"I found the light box."_

_"The fuse box, Britt._ "

"Get out of there now; Kurt's gonna put people down there to check the place out. You need to find an exit  _now_."

" _Fuck_ ," Santana snapped, buzzing out.

" _Is that what you just heard?_ " Artie asked him through their direct link.

"Yeah, Beiste just told him they don't check down there too often."

" _Shit, alright. Tina_ ," Artie switched to the wide again. " _You gotta get out of there too. Odds are, the police are going to look around everywhere._ "

" _But—what about Blaine??_ " Cut to Tina as she knelt by a large, wooden pair of doors in the ground, having finally found a way in.

" _He'll be fine, Tina—_ "

" _I'm not leaving Blaine, Artie!"_

"Tina, it's fine," Blaine assured calmly. "I'll be okay. Get back to the others, and I'll meet you at the safe-house."

Tina made a noise of discomfort, but she didn't seem to want to argue. " _Okay_."

Then, Blaine caught Kurt looking around once more before heading out. Blaine put his gaze on Beiste then and watched her turn to go through into the hallway.

"Where are  _you_  going?" He whispered to himself, backing up to follow her and managing to turn around along the way.

Eventually, he made it to the end of the vent line and watched Beiste take an elevator. "Artie, she's taking an elevator down."

" _I think that's as far as you can go in the vents,_ " Artie lamented.

"I guess I have to take the elevator now too."

" _No, Blaine, it's too dangerous._ "

"Why?"

" _What—why?? What if someone sees you?!_ "

"I'll tell them I'm new."

" _That'll never work!!"_

"I'll tell them I'm a drug dealer."

" _That—actually, that might work_."

"I'm going down," he informed as he unhooked the grate by his face.

" _No!! No, Blaine, just come back. It's too dangerous with cops all around; come back, and we'll try heading back there in a few hours when the cops take a break_."

Blaine ignored him as he dropped gently down to the floor. He watched the lights above the elevator denote the floor it fell to. Once it stopped, Blaine gave it a few minutes to make sure no one else was taking it back up before pressing the button.

" _Blaine Anderson, I swear to god,_ " Artie scorned.

"Damn, Artie, I think you're breaking up," Blaine deadpanned as he stepped into the elevator.

" _I stole these transmitters from_ military operatives, _Blaine_. _They couldn’t possibly be breaking up._ "

Blaine began to make static noises with his mouth as he pressed the button. "Nope— _cchhhhhh_ —definitely breaking— _chhhhhhhh_ —breaking up.  _Chhh_."

" _You're a terrible actor."_

"I'm out of practice.  _Chhh_."

" _I hate you so much_."

Blaine smiled to himself with his hands behind his back as the elevator went down.

As the elevator dropped a few stories, Blaine considered how he would approach a situation where someone might meet him as the doors open. Looking up, he inhaled decidedly.

The doors opened slowly once the elevator came to a full stop. No one seemed to be inside. Then, slowly, the upside-down head of a man peeked from above the doorway.

No one else was in front of the elevator.

Blaine flipped himself around and dropped carefully onto the carpeted floor. He looked around the immediate area.

It was a red hallway: the walls, the carpet, the decor: most of it was dull shades of red. It seemed overall very nice and well-kept. Such a dichotomy from the main level of the building. It made him wonder what the other floors held within them.

Suddenly, Blaine heard footsteps. He looked wildly around for something to hide under before looking up again. Nothing. Not even a chandelier. Thankfully, the hallway came around a wall, so he backed up close to the wall and waited for the person to walk by. Blaine held his breath as the man with his head in his phone stepped by, not even recognizing Blaine's presence. He clicked the elevator button and kept his back to Blaine. Blaine figured this would be a good time to leave as the elevator doors opened, so he slid around the corner and carefully started down the hallway. He heard distant chatter, but it sounded like it was coming through the far wall. Blaine ignored it for the moment.

Soon, he came to another opening, and it was something like a lobby area with doors lining the octagonal walls. He radio-d Artie:

"Help me out here, A-A," he requested lowly.

He heard some scrambling. " _Where are you right now, Blaine?_ "

"Some lobby thing. Five doors across from me."

" _Uhh_..." Artie sounded exasperated. " _Five...? Blaine, I have no idea where you are_."

Santana cut in. " _Take the one second on your right, Twinkle Toes._ "

" _What?_ " Artie cut back.

" _This is exactly how I came in, buddy. You're going the right way."_

" _What?? You took this way too?? Are you people insane??_ " Artie squawked.

Blaine grinned and approached the door, slipping silently through it.

" _Sneaks like us know how to get places. How do you think I got those photos? There aren't any windows from the top levels down there."_

Artie made a disgruntled noise. " _I really hate you guys._ "

"We love you too, A-A," Blaine cooed as he stepped into a dark room, lit only by lights behind a large glass window. He approached what looked like an overlook into the warehouse-like area below.

Boxes and boxes moved on conveyor belts below. It was a rig of impressive size, and right at the front of it was a giant money press, workers moving around the entire rig. It printed large sheets of really—pretty incredibly—official-looking $50 bills. Along the far wall, stacks of boxes lined the floor, and some stacks reached the ceiling. Blaine marveled at the extent of the rig. "Guys, this... This is pretty crazy."

" _I really couldn't capture how big it was with just the camera,_ " Santana lamented. " _But yeah, it's pretty incredible._ "

" _Incredibly illegal,"_  Blaine caught Tina mumble.

" _Oh, sure, coming from a hacker in a group of professional thieves_ ," Santana threw back.

Blaine cut in before they could get in a fight. "Guys, chill out. Is there any way to get down there from here, Santana?"

" _I didn't check. But I think the only door in that room is the one you entered from."_

Blaine pursed his lips. He took another long look at the rig below, noticing his Great Aunt's pens near the press. Inhaling, he left the room. Back in the lobby, he called over the comm again. "Where do the other doors go, Santana?"

The comm was silent for a moment before she inhaled and exhaled. " _The one on your left when you exit leads to some office room. It’s all empty; like, not even trash is in there, so I don't think they use it. The middle door has stairs behind it, but I heard people talking down there, so I didn't go there._ "

"And the other two?"

" _The one right next to the middle door was locked. I would have picked it, but I had already found the room you were just in, so I figured it didn't matter._ "

"Got it," Blaine understood

" _And the last one had stairs going up. I guess even in counterfeit businesses, you gotta have safety regulations_."

Blaine nodded to himself and went towards the locked door. He put his ear up to it. He couldn't hear anything, but part of him wondered if the door was just thick. To test it, he approached the middle door and listened for voices. It sounded clear even from there, so it seemed like any sound would come right through. That isn't to say whoever might be behind the locked door isn't just staying silent.

Blaine wasn't sure whether he wanted to take that risk, lest it be Beiste herself. She's smart, and she probably has smart guards at her fingertips. Drunk idiots, however, Blaine could handle. Slowly, he opened the middle door and stepped onto the stairs. The first one creaked—he cursed—so he backed onto the wall as he closed the door and toed each stair gently. The laughter and talking began to grow in volume, and he could see an opening at the bottom of the stairs right before the hallway continued, and he guessed that was where the people were.

As he came to the bottom of the stairs, Blaine ducked to a crouch. Slowly, he peeked his head to look through into the room. It seemed like a lounge of some sort, but it was rather small. Across the room was a small television in front of an old-looking couch. Three or four people sat on and around it, and they seemed to be watching something. Blaine stepped on by, heading down the darker hallway. He passed a few doors—he could hear odd sounds coming from one or two—and soon came to a door with a piece of paper on it that read a schedule of some kind. Blaine took a long look at it. It seemed like the "company" had about two dozen workers, and they seemed to work variable hours. Some people worked three hours at time, others close to ten. Blaine pulled out his camera and took a picture of the schedule for future reference.

Then, he pulled the door open to find a spiral staircase, letting a whoosh of cool air stream through him, that led right into the warehouse. The angle of the door made it so that people down in the main area couldn't quite see the open door unless they were right at the bottom of the stairs. Blaine peeked out to check the workers. There seemed to be five or six people walking around, working hard to transfer boxes and sheets of money. Suddenly, a loud bell went off, making Blaine jump and panic for a moment; however, the workers below seemed to just file out towards a far, windowless room. Blaine looked back down the hall to the lounge, but nothing seemed to change. He figured it was a shift change, but it might just be a small break session.

Blaine knew he had to hurry. Quickly, he stepped onto the stairs and climbed over the rail. He began to descend the stairs by shifting downwards carefully. Near the bottom, he hopped off and landed noiselessly on the floor, crouching immediately. His eyes traced the perimeter, but the warehouse was completely empty. He began towards the press. He knew he couldn't pull off the entire heist in the amount of time he wasn't even sure he had, but he could get close enough to the press and the pens to check out the situation up-close. First, he checked some of the boxes that weren't quite full. The fake money was not even cut yet, but that must be a separate process. As it so happened, the box next to it, slightly open, did have cut pieces. Blaine reached in and grabbed a handful for Artie to examine. Next, he toed over to the glass case with his ancient Aunt's pens. A difficult-looking lock sat on the bottom of the front.

"So close, yet so far," he mumbled as he stared at it. Blinking, he pulled out his camera and took a quick set of pictures.

He decided to take some pictures of the warehouse from this angle, and he did so quickly. As he started towards the stairs again, the jarring bell sounded off again, making him curse and run towards the staircase. As he began to scale it (up the back, to be safer), the door across the way opened, and the workers from before filed in, just as Blaine reached the top. Breathing heavy, Blaine stopped at the top of the stairs to catch his breath. He opened the door again and slid into the hallway.

Carefully as before, he snuck up to the lobby and began to head to the elevator again. He looked back at the locked door. The explorer in him really wanted to see what was in there, but the realist needed him to get back to the safe house. Maybe once this place is busted, he'll be able to see what's in there, but for now...

He headed back to the elevator, listening intently for signs of guards. He pressed the button and considered his options again as he waited. The elevator came soon, and he stepped inside and began to do the same thing as before, only, as soon as the doors closed, they began to open again. Immediately, Blaine wrenched himself into the ceiling of the elevator as two men entered the elevator; one of them was smoking. Blaine's nose twitched at the gross smell.

"Fuckin' hell about those hours, right?" The smoker began.

"Nine, man. Fuckin'  _nine_ ," the other agreed.

"Bitch doesn't know how much money she's got by now, why do we gotta work so long?" Blaine figured the well-spoken gentleman was talking about Beiste, the owner of the bar and counterfeit scheme.

"I don't know, man, but it's bull shit."

Blaine felt his leg cramp a little. The wall squeaked as he moved his leg. Biting his lip, Blaine internally cursed himself as the men looked to the sides of the elevator. Blaine stared with bated breath as the men asked each other what that was.

Eventually, the smoker made a noise of dismissal. "This fuckin' thing's so old and broken."

Blaine closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, relieved. As the doors opened, the men started down the hall. Blaine waited a minute before slipping out a few feet behind him. Looking up, he located the opening in the vent and scrambled a bit to haul himself up. As he closed the grate again after screwing it in place, he heard the elevator open again. Blaine watched through the grate as Beiste herself came out. He almost laughed to himself at how incredible his timing was. She was on the phone too.

"I've got fifteen boxes going upstate in a week... Westchester. You want ten? I can probably—Okay... Okay, I can do that." She started down the hall. Blaine tried to follow as well as he could. "Upper West? Sure, Sir, I'll get it to you in a few days... Yes... Sure... Absolutely, sir, thank you." She hung up. Blaine considered the conversation for a moment, wondering who these people were that she was sending this money to. Something he had to think about with the others.

He decided not to follow her. Instead, he figured now would be a good time to get back to the safe house. He made his way back to the small storage room and slipped out of the whole building. He quickly managed to locate a way onto the rooftops before heading back towards the safe house.

 ++++

Artie sighed. "Alright, guys, we've got some problems." The projector showed a picture Blaine took of the case of pens. "This lock here is…  Un-pick-able to say the least. It’s some type of godsend just knowing it _exists_ , and while it's in use, there's no way to get into the box, even if we steal it."

"Can't we just break the glass?" Santana asked.

"I wish," Artie lamented as he turned to her. "The box itself is actually a few layers of Plexiglas. We won't be able to break it through brute force."

"You can melt Plexiglas with a hot iron, though!" Tina chimed in.

Artie thought about it for a moment. "Maybe. It would take a while. I was thinking we should just try to get it from Beiste or her office. On that note," Artie continued, clicking to the next slide, an angle from in the warehouse pointed upward, "Blaine got some good pictures of the warehouse and, most importantly, information about the mysterious locked room."

"Wait, I did?" Blaine asked, surprised.

"You sure did," Artie grinned. The slide now displayed a close up of a wall of windows above the warehouse.

"Isn't that just the overlook?" Santana asked with a frown.

Artie shook his head and took out a pointer. "The two windows on the right are, but do you see this break?" He pointed to a large bit of space between two windows. "That's the wall separating the two rooms. This set of windows—"

"Wait, wait, wait, wait—" Santana interrupted, waving her hands. "Hold up, Genius, according to the orientation of the rooms, the room next to the overlook is just office space. It's completely empty. The locked room is on the other side of that lobby-thing."

"And  _that's_  where things get interesting," Artie immediately shot back with a big grin. "Look here," he started, pointing to the windows on the left. "You see that shadow behind the blinds?" The others leaned forward, looking close. "That's Beiste." The others flinched a little.

"Woah!" Blaine yelped, his face flushing. "Was she watching me??"

"I don't think so," Artie corrected, "it looks like she's holding something to her head and turned the other way. She might have been on the phone."

Blaine looked down in thought. "That makes sense," he mumbled. The others looked to him. He looked up at them. "When I was leaving, I heard her come up the elevator. She was on the phone with someone, talking about shipments. She said she had 15 boxes going to Westchester, and the person she was talking to wanted 10 to go to the Upper West Side."

Artie hummed. "Interesting. Bears some thought as to how she gets her customers."

Blaine nodded. "That's what I was thinking."

Artie thought for a moment before Tina got a word in:

"But wait—Santana said that the room with office spaces is empty. Why would Beiste use a room that was basically unused to conduct her business?"

"Not to mention," Santana agreed, "the only door that seems to lock is the one that's _already_ locked."

Tina nodded at her. "It's more of a risk to use such an easily-reached room."

"That's exactly it," Artie agreed. "My thought is that she uses the locked room as a diversion. I doubt there's really anything of importance there: it serves the purpose of drawing people to it and then possibly setting off an alarm once the door is picked or broken into."

"Whoever the person is," Blaine continued, "they're obviously not allowed to be there if they don't know about the door."

Artie nodded. "Exactly. With that in mind, it looks like the room with the office space is where she conducts her business even with the risk of people listening. Then again, it seemed to work since Blaine had no idea she was in there, possibly having a number of other phone conversations. That way, she can look over the warehouse while conducting the management."

The others nodded slowly. Santana started slowly: “So… What then?”

Artie tilted his head thoughtfully. “So… We can assume that she keeps all the most important stuff hidden in that office space.”

“Like the key?” Blaine suggested.

Artie nodded. “It’s possible. I think the main thing is to get that key through any means and then get the pens. On that note, here’s the plan: Santana and Brittany took out a lot of security systems, but we’ve still got a lot of variables to consider. Blaine passed a _lot_ of workers on the way down to the warehouse. He did, however, find the schedule for workers.” Artie clicked to the next slide which was a picture of the schedule Blaine found of the door. “I did some calculations, and it seems like the hours are almost random from person to person. They’re staggered almost thoughtlessly: like Beiste added people as she needed them. The hours are also staggered rather unevenly and very close against each other: one shift will start three-quarters of the way through another, but sometimes there will be a good fifteen or twenty minutes between them.”

“Looks like that’ll be our window,” Santana cut in. Artie nodded.

“I agree. Considering that it’ll be the most efficient use of our time, we’ll only have one opportunity to take advantage of this possible oversight.”

“It really doesn’t lend us much room for error,” Blaine added at the end.

“You’re absolutely right. Time to make a plan. First of all, we need a way in. Blaine and Santana got lucky when they were able to sneak in and take the elevator—and more so that Blaine managed to get close enough to the press itself while the workers were on break—but we can’t rely on luck. Anything could happen. Here’s the run-down:

“Beiste doesn’t know what most of us look like. Santana: I suggest you go to Beiste tonight and ask for a job. You don’t need to tell her much; just tell her you need a job, and I’m sure she could at least give you a bar position. My guess is that she doesn’t tell all of her employees about the printing scheme, but I’m sure you can quickly find a way to get a reason to get down into the main place anyway.” Santana nodded in affirmation. “Oh, and, if you have any opportunities to lessen their ranks, do it. Just don’t kill anyone. We don’t want to add murder to our list of federal crimes—At least, _I_ don’t want to add murder to our list of federal crimes.

“Brittany: We need you on the outside. Tina found a basement entrance that will at least get us a floor or two below the bar floor, so get down there and do the same thing: make the area safe, and then locate the elevator to make sure whoever’s down in the lowest floor can get out fast.

“Tina: Now that we have reasonable information about their security cameras, I’ll need you to help me keep an eye on our guys in the inside. I need you to hack the system Brittany managed to swipe from the work she and Santana did underground.” He pulled out a security camera that was left only slightly in-tact.

“I’ll do what I can,” Tina promised hesitantly, gently picking up the hardly-together object, her eyes widening comically at the degree of pummeling it received.

“Great. Blaine, I designed this unobvious bug for the inside of the area Beiste conducts her business within. It probably won’t grant us much, but anything could happen.” He inhaled deeply and exhaled, turning to face Blaine fully. “Finally, Blaine… And I can’t believe I’m saying this… But I think we need to take advantage of the police being around for this one. I’m glad you grabbed some of the printed money because I’m sure we can hand it off to the police since they’re already investigating around the area. Unfortunately, they’re investigating for _us_ , so I doubt you’ll have an easy time convincing them to intervene in the bar itself. With luck, they’ll clear out some more workers and keep Beiste occupied while we get down to business.”

“What happened to ‘we can’t rely on luck’?” Blaine asked teasingly.

Artie glared at Blaine. “We aren’t _relying_ on the police to help us. Either way, we aren’t really at any risk like we are with sneaking in. If they trust Blaine’s word—and might I add, Blaine, you are _not_ going to just walk up to the detective and tell him about the counterfeiting, so don’t even ask—” Blaine put his hands up and looked down, unable to keep the smile off his face. “—if they trust us, then they can probably help us. If they don’t trust us and ignore our word, then they won’t get in our way.” He inhaled, flicking his eyes to the floor. “Probably.”

Brittany made a face of confusion. “But… What if they try to protect the bar _from_ us?”

This notion stopped Artie for a moment. The others watched him think about this scenario. It appeared as though he hadn’t considered this. Blaine leaned forward and cut in: “Well, if we really edge it in that it at least came from that street, they’ll do more investigating of that area and still possibly get Beiste distracted. That’s the main thing. I think it’ll work either way.”

They all nodded, ready to embark. Artie nodded, and they headed off.

++++

Santana, dressed in a very modern, rather ordinary outfit, approached the bar and spoke with the bar owner, asking for a job. They laughed and smiled together, and it seemed like Santana was getting good results. She left with a small wave, leaving behind a phone number they could use safely.

++++

Meanwhile, Brittany socked a single punch in a skinny brute’s face. He fell with a jumbling “ _thunk”_ into a pile of other men of similar statures. She wiped her hands off each other and began to drag them into an empty room.

++++

Blaine, across the city, leapt over rooftops, the wind rushing by him as he kept an eye out for people he recognized as he headed towards police headquarters. He figured he could slip the note about counterfeit money into just about anyone’s office, but he had one person in particular in mind for who to give it to.

++++

Detective Hummel, hands curled together under his furrowed brow, hunched over the desk in his office. He sighed as he lifted his head and flattened his hands over his nose. He just began to stand with the intent to look over the information he had on that Anderson when—suddenly—a soft knocking came from behind him: the window. Kurt whipped around, expecting that _criminal_ to be there to put him on a mock him, but he was surprised to see, instead, a letter stuck to the window with a name delicately written on the front:

_**Kurt** _

His heart leaped at the influx of hearts doodled on the envelope front, but the frustration with this man overshot the childish romantic interest in the hearts. Jutting his jaw out, he opened the window and reached up to grab the oddly-full envelope. He sighed again as he leaned on his desk, keeping an eye on the window, as he gently opened the letter. He frowned when the contents first showed him a small stack of dollar bills. Taken aback, the detective pulled out the letter itself, flushing when he saw more of the same hearts lining the margins of a handwritten letter:

_**To The Most Beautiful Man in the World, Detective Kurt Hummel:** _

_**Your eyes take my breath away. The subtle golds that flit over the glorious blues and greens never cease to amaze me.** _

Kurt gasped and slapped his hand to his mouth, having to look away from the letter, already flushed a deep red. His hand still on his face, he couldn’t keep his jaw from gaping at how objectively _wonderful_ Anderson spoke about him.

He couldn’t help himself from absolutely loving it. He looked back to the letter.

_**It really parallels your subtle yet brilliant mind and how well you do your job. You do your job so well that it seems I might need your help on something. Enclosed in this letter is a set of what appears to be normal dollar bills, but I’m afraid there is a bit of a counterfeit scheme going on in underground New York. I won’t lie to you, My Beautiful Kurt, I swiped these from the counterfeiting place itself: Beiste’s Bar on 12 th street. I know you’ve been investigating there, so please, if you can suspend your hatred for me, we can possibly indirectly help each other.** _

_**I promise I would not lie to you. I care too much for our relationship as it is. Trust me, my dear, there’s a nasty scheme happening right in the middle of your city, and if you care about it enough to devote your life to extinguishing crime, you’ll want to check this out.** _

_**I must be off, and if you don’t believe me about the money, then check it. Take care, my Dear, and be safe.** _

_**With Love,** _

_**B. Anderson.** _

Flushed with a mix of rage and a confusing feeling of slight infatuation, Kurt gaped over the first statement alone: “ _To the most beautiful detective in the world.”_ Swallowing, he felt his stomach flip at how, once again, he really hadn’t been referred to in such terms for a _long_ time.

In this context, he _hated_ it. He also, frustratingly enough, _loved_ it.

Even so, the claims “B. Anderson” made about a counterfeit scheme underneath 12th street stuck out to him possibly more than the numerous, stalker-ish references to his beauty (the eyes part really got him). He folded the letter up with slightly shaky hands as he reached for the bills again. He looked over them with his own eyes at first, but they really seemed like regular fives and tens. He flicked his eyes to the letter again with pursed lips before leaving his office.

“I need someone to check for counterfeit!” he called out over the officers at their own desks.

++++

Soon, Kurt was leaning over with his hand pressed on a desk and his other hand on his hip as a counterfeit checking specialist examined the set of dollar bills through her computer. After a second, the woman sighed and adjusted the top of her hijab before pushing the laptop forward. “You were right. They’re fake,” she informed. Across the room, Commissioner Hummel frowned and looked to Kurt.

“Where did you find these?” he asked with extreme concern.

Kurt let out a sigh of his own as he gathered the bills up. He thanked the specialist as she began to pack up. He began to walk out with the Commissioner. “I have to be honest, sir. I got a letter from Anderson.”

Burt raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”

Kurt nodded and looked up at him as he headed into the Commissioner’s office. “He told me it’s from that bar on 12th street.”

“Oh, Kurt, it could be from anywhere. He could have forged it himself.”

Kurt shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s not his MO.”

Burt made a face. “Kurt, his MO is _criminality_. He’s a _criminal_ , and he’ll do anything to get you off his trail.”

Gaping a bit, Kurt was almost hurt by his father’s words. “I don’t think so!” he responded indignantly. “Anderson’s a thief, but he’s not a _liar_ —”

“Kurt, that’s exactly what he is: a thief _and_ a liar,” Burt interrupted as he moved to his seat. “You can’t trust him, Kurt, and if you do, I might question your intuition a little.” Kurt hollowed his cheeks almost sheepishly. “Especially if it turns out to be wrong.” Sighing, Kurt looked away. He blinked as he tried to think of something else to say, but his eyes eventually trailed to the fake money in his hand. Burt shifted in his seat and inhaled deeply. “You know what? Fine.” Kurt blinked and looked up. Burt had his hands laced together, leaning forward on his desk. “Investigate 12 th street. I’ll let you follow this, but do not—and I’m serious here,” he cautioned, pointing up to Kurt, “Do not harass that bar owner for counterfeit money. This—what you have here—is not reasonable evidence to send a whole team down to chase after something that a _thief_ told you about. That’s not how I conduct my department, and that’s not how I’m gonna let _you_ conduct my people.”

Kurt nodded quickly, wholly accepting the warning. He headed out and into his own office, immediately organizing search parties to investigate 12th street; in particular, near the bar. He knew his father didn’t want him doing this, but something in him thought Anderson wouldn’t lead him astray. He’s slippery and frustrating, but he isn’t the type to make something like this up.

Plus, if he went with it, he might get to Anderson anyway.

Set with his decisions, he took the envelope of money (after carefully tucking away the letter in his desk) and went out to put together his teams.

++++

Meanwhile, Blaine made his way back to the hideout. Artie was waiting patiently with his computer open, typing wildly as he reached over his messy desk in multiple directions. He turned a knob as he watched Blaine enter and sit down. “You did it, right?”

“Sure did,” Blaine affirmed knowingly, despite not knowing what Artie meant.

Artie nodded as he turned the knob a little more. Slowly, the sound of static began to fill the room. Blaine frowned at the small speaker system. Then, as Artie typed a few more things with one hand, a distant voice began to come through the speaker. Blaine leaned forward as Artie turned another knob, and the static filtered away as the voice came through clearer. “Is that Beiste?” Blaine asked.

Artie nodded again. “That’s her.”

“She must have gone into the office right after I put the bug in,” Blaine presumed. Artie sighed and sat back.

“Just as long as she doesn’t know it’s there. While we wait for the police to start working on this, we can at least get a few days’ worth of information out of her.”

Blaine put his hands up to his face in thought. Then, blinking, he remembered something important: “Oh yeah—I saw Santana getting a job with one of Beiste’s managers.”

Artie looked to him. “Really? She didn’t meet with Beiste herself?”

Blaine shrugged and shook his head. “I guess she didn’t have to. She got the job, though. You didn’t hear from her?”

Artie shook his head and shrugged. “Nope. What time was that?”

“Uhh, right after we left the Safe House an hour ago.”

Pursing his lips and frowning, Artie leaned back. He hummed softly. “… Well, maybe she decided to pass the time instead of coming straight back.”

“Are you _okay_ with that?” Blaine asked, unsure.

“Not really,” Artie sighed, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair. “But I can’t really stop her. She kind of does her own thing.” Blaine clenched his jaw nervously and thoughtfully as Artie leaned forward again. “I think it’s probably fine. As long as she doesn’t get into trouble, she’ll probably be fine. Now we’ll just have to prepare for the final scheme. Hopefully Brittany will help us get rid of some guards, so I think we’ll at least have to wait for her to give us the O-K.”

Blaine inhaled and exhaled in acceptance. Then suddenly, a voice came through both of their headsets.

“ _I’m in, guys. I’m working the bar. Apparently they were looking for new people anyway._ ”

“Really?” Blaine asked, frowning at the notion. “That was fast.”

“ _Yeah. I’ll have to do some digging, but the guy I talked to here said they had to let some people go. I don’t know if that meant they fired folks, or they needed more downstairs, or just killed them, or what_ —”

“Let’s keep things positive,” Artie suggested, giving Blaine a worried look.

 _“Whatever. I got the job, that’s what’s important. I’m gonna head back to the bar and start working. I’ll keep an eye out for Beiste and let you know what happens._ ”

“Thanks, Santana. Be safe,” Artie followed as he turned his chair around. He wheeled over to another desk and picked up some photos, looking over them as he wheeled, one handed, back to Blaine. “Okay, next. I think the main thing to worry about is how to get this box open. I looked over some of these photos you took—did some enlarging and police-department-grade filtering—and now, we know where the key is.”

Blaine furrowed his eyebrows. “We do?”

“We do,” Artie confirmed. “See this?” He pointed to one of the photographs of Beiste. Blaine peered over it with a mixed expression. “She only has three keys on her keychain. I’ve seen her use this,” he circled one with a blue marker, “for the entrances of the bar. It’s the main key. She’s used this one,” he circled the key next to it with a green marker, “on her car. This one,” he finally points to the bronze key and circles it in red a few times, “has been used for nothing else. The bug in her office has informed me that she will be entrusting her keys with one of her barmen tonight.” Artie looked up at Blaine. “Santana will get them. I’ll figure out something with her, and as soon as she gets those keys, she’ll give them to you, and you’ll get downstairs and open the box.”

“Are you sure the key is for the lock box?” Blaine asked with a frown.

Artie frowned for himself and looked to Blaine. “What else would it be for?”

Blaine raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “I don’t know—her house, her safety deposit box—oh, uh, that locked room in the lobby?” Blaine finished in a snarky manner.

Disbelieving air pushed through Artie’s lips as he made a face that obviously brushed the notion away. “No way. That room’s a dud—we determined that when you got back from your recon mission.” Blaine was still unconvinced as Artie inhaled and backed from the desk, spinning around and rolling toward the opposite wall. He leaned back and stared up at the wall of photographs connected and interconnected by colored strings. His eyes trailed over one photo, and it caused him to blink and look back at Blaine. “You said you dropped that letter off to the Detective, right?” Blaine nodded. “Did you talk to him?”

Blaine pursed his lips and stood up to stand beside Artie. “No, I figured it might be better to just leave it in his office and let him figure out what to do with it.” Then, with a sideways smile, “Safer, you know?”

Artie nodded with a smile. “Yeah, that’s fine. We can only hope that Detective Hummel will be on our side with this—uhh, with this—” Artie adjusted his earpiece.

Suddenly, someone was whispering into both their ears. “ _Hey, guys, we’ve got a problem._ ” Blaine and Artie shared a look as Santana informed them. “Beiste isn’t leaving until later tonight—like way later tonight—and the only reason she’s staying is because we’ve got cops.”

“Shit,” Artie said under his breath. “That’s actually gonna be a problem for you, Santana.”

“You didn’t think of that?” Blaine asked Artie in a panic.

Artie looked up at him with wild eyes as he shook his head. “I completely forgot Detective Hummel knows what we all look like,” he whispered to Blaine.

“ _If Gay Face sees me, I’m done for_ ,” Santana continued. Blaine rolled his eyes at the nickname. “ _But I haven’t seen him yet.”_

“Do you need some backup?” Blaine asked, pacing behind Artie.

++++

Across the city, Santana scratched the back of her neck as she peeked around a corner of the bar. “I don’t know yet. If I get one word of Hummel, I’ll let you know, but I—” She cut herself off when one of her coworkers turned the corner. “Hey,” she whispered abruptly, grabbing his attention. “Listen, I get this whole thing,” she threw with a smart grin, “half of you guys are bad with the law.” The guy tried to remain coy for a moment, but he soon nodded in recognition. “I gotta admit: I’m not on good terms with the cops either. Just—if you could do me a favor, I’d really appreciate it—I need to be on the down low, especially if the head Detective shows up.”

The tall, CW-haired man with a cattish face nodded with sympathy. “You got it, Santana. We all have some shit to hide from these guys. We’ll protect you.” He looked out into the main area for a moment before turning to her and stepping closer to her. “Look, we’ve got a secret floor we can put you on.” Santana’s eyes lit up. “If you can’t be seen by the cops, we can put you down there—you just need to swear, fucking _swear_ , that you won’t mention it all to anyone, alright?” He warned dangerously.

Santana feigned confusion with an unsure smirk. “What, you got a drug business goin’ on?” she asked sarcastically.

The guy smirked and tilted his head as he looked away and pointed. “Get down this hall and go to the elevator. Take it to the third basement floor and warn the other workers down there that we’ve got cops. They’ll know what to do, and they’ll help you stay away from them. We’ll protect you here.”

Santana nodded, blown away by the amount of convenience in this situation. “Just down the hall?” she pretended to clarify.

Her coworker nodded and turned to look for cops. “Yeah, just go. I’ll fill Beiste in when I can.”

“Listen,” she grabbed him again and squeezed his hand. “Thank you. Really.” She threw a huge, faux-grateful grin.

He threw her one back as he squeezed back and went back into the bar. Santana made a face at her hands, shaking them out in disgust as she hurried down the hall.

“ _Santana?_ ” Artie went off in her ear. She fixed the earpiece as she pressed the button. “ _Santana, what happened?? Did I hear that all right? Are you going downstairs??”_

“Would you shut _up?_ ” Santana snapped between her teeth, looking around behind her for a second. The elevator opened, making her straighten up and flick her chin to get her hair behind her. She stepped into the empty elevator and smoothed down her outfit, pressing the “Close Doors” button so she could give herself some time. “Cops showed up. I didn’t see Hummel, but I thought on my feet. I pulled one of the other bar guys out and just told him I got trouble with the law.”

++++

“Are you kidding me??” Artie nearly screamed, rolling in an arch backwards to face Blaine with a look of terror. Blaine put his hand on his side as he just breathed silently.

++++

Santana sighed. “No, I’m not kidding. Look, Artie, these guys aren’t exactly _saints_ themselves. They have just as much trouble with the law—Hell, I’m sure some of these guys have killed people, like, _actually_ killed people. When I told him I needed to stay out of their way, he understood _immediately_. Then he told me to check out their ‘secret business’ which must be the money rig.” She pressed the button for the third basement floor decidedly.

++++

Artie laughed with dry disbelief, shaking his head. “Wow. That’s incredible.”

“ _Yeah. I might even get closer to our goal here.”_

“Wait, wait, wait,” Artie started, suddenly fearful. “You’ve gotta get those keys, Santana. That’s your goal. If you’re down there, you can’t get the keys.”

Santana stared at the doors and pursed her lips in thought. “ _If you don’t have the keys, you can’t give them to Blaine. Blaine needs to get down there and get into the box_ tonight.” Santana tutted.

“I think I can still get the keys. Plus, at this rate I might be able to get into the box myself,” she suggested with a shrug.

++++

Blaine and Artie exchanged worried looks. Blaine shrugged. “If you can get those pens, by all means, get them.” He swallowed and shrugged at Artie. “I don’t have to be the one to retrieve them.”

++++

“Exactly,” Santana barked. She flicked her eyes up to the glowing floor sign. “I’ll get the keys tonight and get into the box,” she promised: just as the doors opened, and Santana shook her hair behind her before strutting through.

++++

At the Safe House, Blaine sighed and sat at a chair. He ran a hand through his hair as he disconnected from the communication. Artie did the same thing as he turned to face Blaine.

“Are you gonna be okay with this?” Artie asked him.

Blaine licked his lips. After a moment, he threw a hand up. “If Santana thinks she can pull it off without… I don’t know, a way out or even a transportation device, then…” He shrugged. “Then I guess I trust her. I think I’ll head to the bar anyway.” He looked to Artie. “Maybe back her up and keep in communication.” Artie nodded, accepting that. After a short breath, Blaine opened his mouth again. “Have you heard from Brittany?”

Artie nodded. “She knocked some guys out in the floor underneath the bar. She also found an exit, but it’s in a pretty awkward spot.”

Blaine frowned. “Where is it?”

Artie raised a worried eyebrow. “… It’s in the break room.”

Frozen for a moment, Blaine almost immediately let out a tense breath. He remembers seeing into that break room. That room is the kind of environment that always has people spending free time there: they rotate more efficiently than the job alternates themselves. “That’s… gonna be tough,” Blaine lamented with an exhale.

“Yes it will,” Artie agreed. “But, I think you should give Santana a hand. It would be good to show up and back her up. Talk to Brittany too. I’m sure she’ll have more for you by now.”

“Sounds good,” Blaine affirmed. “I think I’ll head out now—”

Tina bounded around the corner. “Blaine!” she called, interrupting him. Blaine looked over and smiled at her. She beamed back, although timid. “Be safe, okay?”

Blaine grinned wider and nodded. With that, he slipped his mask on and headed out.

++++

Kurt stepped out of his car with a definitive swish of his overcoat. He pulled his sunglasses off as he watched police officers shuffle into and out from the bar across the street. With a deep inhale and hard eyes, he headed towards it himself.

++++

_“Santana? Santana, do you read me?”_

“Loud and _mostly_ clear, Four-Eyes.”

_“Thank goodness. How are things going?”_

“Hold on,” Santana grunted, arm locked around the neck of a skinny man who clawed pointlessly at the air and her elbow before his eyes rolled back and his arms fell. Santana held him for another few seconds before letting him drop to the floor. She peered down at her arm, checking the purple crescents that now marked her skin, then glared down at the sleep-induced man. “ _Niño perra,_ ” she spat under her breath.

“ _What was that?”_

“Nothing.” Santana flipped her hair before squatting down and filing through her victim’s coat. Her red lips stretched in a devilish smile as she delicately pulled up a set of three keys on a keychain. “I just got us a set of keys, _mi compañero._ ”

++++

Blaine perched up on a comfortable recon position, overlooking Beiste’s bar from another building. He brought a finger to his ear. “Hey, Brittany?” he called through a private line.

It took a moment, but a chipper voice soon greeted him back: “ _Hi, Blaine!”_

Blaine smiled to himself. “How’s it going?”

“ _It’s good. I’m kinda hungry.”_

“I promise we’ll get something to eat once the heist is over.” He looked down at his watch. 18:36. It might be a long night. “How’s your position in the basement?”

“ _Dark. Kinda scary.”_

“And the guards?

“ _They’re all sleeping.”_

Blaine blinked. “Uhh, just sleeping, right? Not… Not _dead_ , right?”

He could hear some shuffling in his ear, worrying him for a long moment, before the voice rang through again: “ _Nope, just sleeping.”_

Blaine sighed, whispering a soft, “thank goodness,” under his breath. “Okay, good. What about secret ways out of the building from the floor below you?”

“ _Just the vent that goes into the Man Cave._ ”

“The… Man Cave?” Blaine asked, unclear.

“ _That’s what I heard some guys call it. I think someone needs to tell them that that’s not a cave that they’re hanging out in.”_

Blaine closed his eyes and nodded to himself with a small smile. “Yeah. Someone should tell them that.” He sighed and perked up a little when he saw the _beautiful-wonderful-incredibly-gorgeous-and-talented_ Kurt Hummel strut into the bar. He had to work fast. “Listen, is there anything else you’ve found? Maybe an exit that’s in a more convenient place?”

“ _Nope. Sorry, Blainey.”_ Blaine sighed heavier. “ _But there is that storage place you and Tina found, right? Behind the bar?_ ” Blaine blinked, thinking back to the small room connected to the long hallway that immediately led to the elevator. “ _That could work, right?”_

“Maybe,” Blaine pondered, rubbing his lips together. “It’ll be hard getting to it with cops and workers pretty much everywhere now.” He cringed. “That may or may not be my fault,” he gritted, softer.

_“It’s not your fault, Blainey. It might help.”_

Blaine remained silent. After a minute, he spoke again: “Listen, Britt, you might have to get out of there. Some officers are probably going to find the elevator soon, and you’re on the first floor they’ll want to check out. Maybe make sure they can find those guards you knocked out so they have more of a reason to check that floor longer.”

_“Okay. I’ll go back to the Safe House then.”_

“Good idea. I’ll see you back at home. Be safe, Britt.”

“ _You too, Blainey.”_

With that, Blaine ended the link and leaped out of his spot to get down to business.

++++

A pile of papers falling out of a manila folder slapped onto a table. Shannon Beiste frowned down at the set before looking up with an open mouth. “What the hell is this?”

Kurt crossed his arms. “This is a warrant. We have reason to believe you’re running a money laundering scheme somewhere in this building, so we’d like to take a look around.”

Beiste brought her hands up and looked away, baffled. “Why even be polite about it? You’ve got a warrant.”

“We just wanted to let you know before we tear this place apart.”

Beiste tilted her head with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Well, thank you very _much_ , Sir.” Kurt pursed his lips and turned his head to watch the officers search the building. Beiste pulled apart the papers in the folder. “What’s all the rest of this?”

Kurt turned to her again. “Blueprints of the building.” He changed his stance. “Actually, I had some questions for you.” Beiste flicked her eyes up. Kurt pointed to one of the sheets of paper. “Do you have access to the three floors below this building?”

Beiste hesitated. She hesitated for a while, bright eyes flicking between both of Kurt’s eyes. “… Yes we do. The one right below us is for storage.”

“What kind of storage?”

Beiste laughed dryly. “Are you serious?” Kurt put his jaw forward with a glare. Beiste swallowed, almost nervously. “Beer. Alcohol. What else?”

Kurt paused for a moment before inhaling and slowly exhaling. Turning his head, he caught sight of a hallway no cops had touched. “What’s down that hallway?” Beiste kept her lips together. Kurt swung his gaze to her with wide eyes. He leaned over the table, digging his knuckles into the wood. “What is down that hallway?” he gritted slowly and clearly.

Beiste only shook her head for a moment before looking away. Immediately, Kurt straightened up and called to the officers around him to head down that hall. As Kurt himself rounded the hall, he stopped himself when he was met with a large set of elevator doors. One officer with him went ahead and pressed the button, and while it all seemed safe, Kurt’s stomach sank with unknowing fear for what he might find in the floors below.

++++

**_BBBRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNGGGG_ **

Santana cringed at the loud, high-pitched bell that sounded from inside the warehouse. She knew she would only have a few minutes to get to the box, unlock it, grab the pens, and _run the hell out of there_.

She waited for the last shift to file up the stairs, squatted carefully behind a number of boxes, and soon managed to leap out and rush straight towards the glass box. She fiddled with the keys for a bit before grabbing hold of the bronze one. She held it up for a moment, gazing over it, before thrusting it into the keyhole of the glass container. As she tried to turn it, she found herself stuck. Fear rushed through her blood as she frowned and tried the key another way. Nothing.

“Uhh, guys?” she called into her main communication link. “We’ve got a problem.”

++++

Artie and Tina hunched over a desk, examining security footage of the bar.

“ _Uhh, guys?”_ They both jumped at Santana’s voice coming through their headsets. “ _We’ve got a problem._ ”

Artie frowned at Tina as he clarified, “What’s the problem, Santana?”

“ _This key’s a dud.”_ Artie’s skin began to crawl. “ _It doesn’t work on the case_.”

“ _Shit_ ,” Another voice, Blaine, came through.

“Santana, are you sure??” Artie asked fearfully.

“ _Yeah, I’m sure, Dipshit, I’ve got the key in the lock, and it ain’t movin’._ ”

“Ohhhh shit, oh no. Oh jeeze, what are we gonna do,” Artie immediately panicked. Tina took up the line.

“Santana, just get out of there. Go find a place to hide upstairs or something—”

“Just watch out for cops, they’re swarming like flies!” Artie panicked more.

Tina pushed him away, focusing. “Stay calm, Santana. Blaine, get down to Santana’s level as soon as you can. Santana, go to the break room and hang out with some of the workers there—you said that guy upstairs trusts you, so these people should too.”

++++

“On it,” Santana affirmed, pocketing the keys as she hurried to the stairs.

++++

“ _Santana,”_ Tina blinked as Blaine called again, “ _Give me the keys when I meet you. I have an idea Then, get out of the break room through the ceiling vent. Brittany says it’s big enough, and it goes straight to the floor above you_.”

“Just be careful you don’t get caught by police,” Tina warned, “They’ll find that floor soon, and then you’ll be in trouble.”

++++

Santana froze just before the door to the hall up the stairs. “What about Brittany?”

“ _I’m heading back to the base! I’m okay, Santana._ ”

Santana sighed with deep relief. “Okay. Blaine, I’ll meet you later. Let me know when you’re ready to get the keys.”

“ _Roger that._ ”

“ _Be careful, Santana_ ,” Artie warned, very obviously shaken up.

“I will, Four-Eyes, relax,” she threw back, ending the link before heading through the door and stepping down the hall. As she came to the opening into the lounge, she put her Game Face on and fixed her hair a little, going as far as leaning on the wall and pushing her breasts up before calling out to the men sprawled out on the car couch and chairs: “Hey, boys?” Immediately, they all whipped their heads around, jaws dropping. Santana gave them a pout. “I work upstairs, and a bunch of cops just showed up, and I’m kind of in a bad place with the law, so could I hang out down here for a little while?”

All at once, the men nodded silently. Santana grinned and strutted into the lounge, perching up on the arm of the couch and crossing her legs as the animalistic, terrible excuse for men gawked at her. She flipped her hair away from her neck as she turned her head to watch the sports game on the television.

++++

Blaine carefully opened the basement entrance to the bar, peering down and listening for movement before slipping down the stairs into the area. As he backed up on a wall, reaching a corner, he listened closely—police officers exchanged curses as sounds of a body being dragged reached his ears. Blaine slowly peeked around the corner to see three officers standing around a pile of men, knocked out on the ground. One scratched the back of her neck as another gripped the walkie-talkie on his vest. The third had his hands on his hips and was apparently asking the first officer, albeit vainly, who could have done this. He heard the words “back up” requested by the officer with the walkie-talkie. Blaine slid back from the edge a little and whispered into his communication, “Santana get ready.”

++++

Hearing Blaine’s warning, Santana thought on her feet. “Oh my god!” she exclaimed. All the men looked to her again. “I forgot my purse upstairs! Can one of you boys go get it for me? It’s red and square-ish and matches my outfit,” she asked softly, giving them all a sad look mixed with fear and possible admiration.

Without even a pause, all five of the men shot up from their seats and rushed up the stairs, bumping into and shoving each other wildly as they left the area. Smirking, Santana stood and smoothed out her dress, happily alone. “Ready and waiting,” she called back to Blaine.

++++

Blaine peeked around the corner again after affirming with Santana. By now, two more guards showed up, both cursing over the pile of bodies. He heard one ask if they were dead, but the other three officers shook their heads. The woman asked them to help carry the bodies up to the main floor, and they began to do so. In a few minutes, the area was clear. Even so, Blaine didn’t have much time. He hurried to the corner that hid the ventilation screen and pried it open.

“Santana?” he called through it.

++++

Looking up, Santana turned her head a few times to locate the voice. Soon, she found the open square in the ceiling and smirked up at her comrade. “Who would have thought the Voice From Above would be a gay thief?”

“The Christians are gonna be livid,” he joked back, grinning down at his friend. Santana rigged up a way to get to the opening, and Blaine helped haul her up through. He carefully placed down the screen again as Santana brushed off her outfit. “So that key doesn’t work?”

“Not at all,” she confirmed, handing the three keys to him. Blaine huffed and looked down at the keys in his hand. “The funny thing is, the keyhole looked almost too wide for it. Any of the keys, really.” Blaine frowned, looking back up to her. “And I tried all three, and none of them worked. They were the perfect length and the perfect height, but it just looked too wide.” She shrugged, looking completely baffled. “I’ve never seen a wide key like that. Super weird to me.”

Blaine nodded and looked down at the keys again. “Neither have I.” He looked away to one of the walls. He could hear footsteps. “We have to go,” he urged. Turning to Santana, he fixed his statement: “ _You_ have to go. I’ll head back down and figure this out. You get back to the hideout and tell Artie about the keys. Maybe he’ll figure something out.”

Santana nodded and ran for the exit. Blaine headed back to the vent and reopened it, slipping through and balancing himself on the chair Santana moved to reach it earlier as he slid the screen back onto the opening—just as Kurt and some officers filed into that very room.

Kurt’s eyes scanned the room for any sign of foul play. “This is where you found them?” he asked the officer next to him. She nodded and pointed around the floor. A number of blood stains marked the concrete, and he could tell there had been quite a fight in this room.

Frozen on the edge of a chair, Blaine listened carefully to the beautiful Detective’s voice as Kurt asked, muffled slightly, “What about any sign of the perpetrator?”

“We think they might have fought each other.”

++++

Kurt rounded on the male officer he definitely _did not ask_. “You think they all knocked each other out?”

“In-fighting happens, Sir.”

Kurt squinted and dropped his hands on his hips. “Officer, if this was in-fighting, then how was there no one _still standing?_ It’s not like the two guys still up knock _each other out_ at the same time, this isn’t the movies, Officer.”

Blaine smiled to himself as his heart soared for how smart Kurt is.

“Right, Sir…”

“Yeah, I’m right,” Kurt snapped, “Keep looking around. Look for any sign of the perpetrator.” Blaine could hear shuffling and footsteps above him as the officers must have started moving around. He decided it was time to hop down and get to work.

Above, Kurt looked around slowly, icy eyes consuming his surroundings. As they drifted to the corner of the room, his eyes caught sight of a light coming out of the floor. Frowning, he stepped over to what looked like a ventilation screen that led to the floor below. Inhaling, he turned around and walked away, flagging some officers as he went.

++++

Blaine hurried up the stairs, keys in his hand. He went immediately to the door that had thus far been locked tight. Looking down at the keys in his hand, he singled out the bronze key and shoved it into the lock. With a swift turn, it clicked. Slowly, Blaine pushed down on the handle and pushed through the doorway, into a dark room. Like the observation room next door, it had a tall, wide segment of blinds covered the windows, letting in slight bits of light. Blaine closed the door behind him, looking over the room. In the middle of the room sat a desk, covered almost completely with loose papers of varying size and color. Blaine pulled out a flashlight as he locked the door behind him, clicking it on to take a quick look around the room. His eyes caught the wall behind the desk: like the bulletin board behind Artie’s desk, it was filled with photographs and newspaper clippings, all connected by tape and string in an amalgam of combinations. Blaine frowned, almost horrified. The photos were all of his family.

Approaching the wall, his eyes flicked over old photographs and older photographs of family members he has seen too many times in his family’s book. Looking around again, he pulled up his camera and took a photo of the wall, right before dragging his hand over it and yanking it all down. He grabbed a bin next to him and dropped the photos and articles into it, despite feeling a tug in his chest. From his belt, he pulled out a match and lit it, tossing it into the bin. Moving to the desk, he took a picture and then nearly did the same thing, freezing above a small sticky note on the corner of the desk. He frowned as he picked it up. On it, there was a drawing of a set of keys—the same keys on the keychain. Underneath the note, Blaine noticed another set of drawings showing something like a transformation of the three keys. Two of them looked like they could break in half down the length and then spin around and reattach themselves. Blaine took a picture of it before stashing his camera away and pulling the keys out again. He picked out one of the keys and began attempting to wrench it apart. It took a long moment of tough pulling, but it did in fact come apart, making the other two keys on the chain drop to the desk loudly. Awestruck, Blaine looked over the halved key and followed the instructions in the drawing, reattaching it a different way. He did the same to another key once he determined which it was. Then, peering over the sketches again, he put the keys back on the chain in the order it needed and stacked them together.

“Hey Santana,” he called into the comm link.

“ _What?”_

“How wide was the keyhole would you say? About three keys in width maybe?”

There was a long pause. “ _Yeah, actually. That sounds about right. Why? Did you see it?”_

Blaine smiled to himself. “Just a shot in the dark,” he replied, gripping the keys before shoving the papers on the desk into the bin which was filled with flames. He ripped some papers up to make the burning easier, and soon he began to hear Artie talking in his ear.

_“Blaine? Is everything going okay? What did you find?”_

“Information. I have some photos to send you.” Blaine pressed a button on his camera as he finished up tearing sheets of paper apart and tossing them in the waste bin. He left the room swiftly and ran across the hall to the observation room. He could hear footsteps outside just as he closed the door. He had to leave. Looking around, he grabbed a chair in the corner and dragged it to the window. Swiftly, he ripped down the blinds, backed up, and tossed the chair through the glass. Shards of glass and plastic scattered and fell to the warehouse below along with the heavy wooden chair. Blaine rolled his shoulders back, taking a bit of a running start before leaping out and landing roughly in a pile of boxes filled with counterfeit money. Grunting, he pulled himself up and staggered out of the pile, stumbling over to the glass case. Pulling out the keys again, he stacked them together and shoved them into the lock and twisted.

A satisfying _click_ made him sigh with relief. Carefully, he pulled the set of pens out from the case as, from the bag on his back, he pulled out a set of small boxes. He placed each individual pen in each of the boxes, dropping them in the bag again as he pulled out a small card in the shape of a bird. He gently set it down in the display case, leaving it open as he took the keys with him and turned around. “Artie, I need a way out,” he called.

“ _That’s gonna be a problem, Blaine, there are cops_ everywhere.” Blaine squinted up at the observation room with the window still intact. _“We don’t even have cameras on the floor you’re on, but that Detective is most definitely there, and he is most definitely sure_ you’re _there.”_

“How do you know that?” Blaine asked with a frown, pulling out his grappling hook.

“ _I saw him looking down at that vent screen you went through,”_ Tina chirped in, _“He’s smart, Blaine. He’s probably already got people on the floor you’re on.”_

“Yeah, I noticed, actually,” Blaine replied, using his binoculars to peer up into the office next to the observation room. It appeared to be empty. He put his binoculars away and angled the grappling hook up to it. “You don’t have any cameras in the lounge?” he asked, bracing himself as he broke the glass and some shattered back.

“ _None at all. I’m sorry, Blaine, but… We’re blind._ ”

Blaine sighed and hit a button, pulling himself up and into the office. Slipping the hook into his bag, Blaine froze, his eyes still on the contents in his bag.

++++

Artie bit his thumb as the others around him sat silently.

“What are we gonna do if he gets caught?” Brittany asked innocently.

Still biting his thumb, Artie shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I honestly didn’t think the police would take him seriously if he sent them information about the counterfeiting. I guess… we just have to hope Blaine will make it back to us.”

++++

Blaine shook his legs out a little and approached the closed door, zipping his bag as he shouldered it over his back. He crouched low as he slowly opened the door. The other doors were open, and he could hear movement and loud chatter in all of the rooms, so he took a chance and started for the hall. As soon as he rounded the corner, a beautiful voice shouted to him.

“ _Hey!_ Stop right there!” Blaine couldn’t help but smile as his heart leapt in his chest. “Stand up slowly,” Kurt demanded, pointing his gun to the thief, “and put your hands on your head.” Blaine had to comply. Slowly, he raised his hands to his head and stood up just as slowly. Kurt cautiously approached him, remembering how this situation went the last time. Even as Kurt pulled the thief’s hands down and locked him in handcuffs, Blaine remained unbothered. “Funny seeing you here, Anderson,” he said in his ear.

Blaine grinned. “I did tell you about this place,” he tossed back, rolling his shoulders.

“I didn’t think you’d return to the scene of the crime.”

Blaine tilted his head back. “You haven’t even seen the crime yet.”

“I’m sure I’ll be impressed.” Blaine grinned as Kurt shoved him down the hall towards the elevator. “Check downstairs,” he called to the officers.

Holding Blaine by his neck, Kurt pressed the elevator button. “Seems pretty easy that you got me, Beautiful.”

Kurt glared at Blaine as the doors opened. “I’m good at my job.”

Blaine nodded and shot him a look. “You really are.”

Kurt locked eyes with him and swallowed, pushing him into the elevator. Before Blaine could do anything, Kurt shoved him into the wall, keeping him there with his elbow and a leg between both of Blaine’s and reaching behind himself to press the right button. “Don’t try anything funny, Anderson, I’m not letting you _do_ anything this time.”

Blaine couldn’t help but laugh softly. “This is fine to me,” he strained, shaking his head a little to eye Kurt. “I like being pinned to a wall by a cute guy,” he said with a wink. Kurt immediately turned red. Kurt could hardly see much of the thief’s head above the tip of his nose, but he could see a rise in the crook’s eyebrow as he flicked the eye down and up again. “Is that your gun in your pocket or are you happy to see me?”

The elevator opened, and Blaine was all but launched through the doors. He managed to land on his feet as Kurt came behind him and dragged him along with him, even as Blaine laughed softly. Knowing the staggering thief couldn’t see his face, Kurt let himself smirk while Anderson couldn’t see him.

++++

Police car doors swung open as Kurt tossed the criminal into the backseat. “Don’t move,” Kurt demanded, closing the door as he stepped into the passenger seat. Soon, an officer stepped into the driver’s seat, starting the car. “Go, Finn.”

Blaine sat back for a moment as he watched Kurt hold tightly onto the bag he took off his back. “Careful with the goods, Lovely.”

Kurt glared back at him. “What exactly is in here?”

Blaine shook his head. “Just some tools. Nothing special.” Disbelievingly, Kurt smiled and nodded, turning around again. Blaine adjusted his sitting position, edging as close as he could to Kurt through the protective grating. “Listen, you’re gonna want to go back to the bar. I don’t think you’re done there.”

“Don’t you worry, Anderson, I’ve got people swarming the place. Whether or not they’ll find that counterfeit rig will be up to the stars and the moon or… whatever you put your luck into.” The thief stayed silent behind him. Kurt smiled to himself as they turned a corner. “Honestly, it seems like your luck has run out this time, _Handsome_.” The thief still remained oddly silent. Kurt blinked, slightly put off. “Even if Beiste’s bar turns out to be a cover for counterfeit, we’ve got someone far more dangerous in our custody…” He smiled as he began to turn in his seat, “… you—” He froze.

The backseat was completely empty, save for the open handcuffs on the middle seat. The door immediately behind his flapped a bit in the outside breeze. “Stop the car, Finn!!”

++++

Blaine entered the Safe House with a heavy sigh. Immediately, he was met with his four partners, all of them giving him ushering looks.

“Well??” Santana demanded, crossing her arms.

Blaine looked up and gave them a shrug. “Kurt got me.” They all sighed at once. With a grunt, Blaine awkwardly reached into the front of his pant leg. Tina frowned with her whole face as she and the others watched him pull out three small boxes, grinning as he opened one and delicately pulled out a long, feathered fountain pen. “But he’s got a lot to learn if he plans on keeping me.”

They all smiled and cheered as Blaine pulled the other three boxes out from his other pant leg.

++++

Back at the bar, Kurt himself busted open a door that led into a dark, dry room. His nose tickled at the smell of old burning. Bearing a large hole, the wide window across from him let the only other source of light. Approaching it, Kurt carefully stepped over the broken glass and looked down into a warehouse. As he straightened up and looked over it all, his breath hitched at the sight of a _gigantic_ rig of, something that should be of _no_ surprise to Kurt now, counterfeit.

His huff of an exhale left him speechless as he marveled at how—not _real_ it is—incredibly honest Anderson _actually_ was.

++++

“So he got away,” Burt huffed as he dropped his hands on his hips.

Kurt sighed and dropped the black bag on his desk. “Yes. He did, however, somehow forget this very important item,” he noted, smirking at his father as he turned and unzipped it.

“How important is that bag?” Burt asked, almost hopeful.

Kurt tutted and opened the bag, turning back to his father. “He told me to be careful with it. I asked him what was in it, he told me ‘tools, mostly’. I don’t think I believe him. He seemed pretty adamant about making sure I was keeping this bag safe. That means he has valuables. Valuables means we might be one step closer to figuring out who this guy is.”

Burt shifted his weight, unsure. “You sure?”

“Yep,” Kurt affirmed, opening the bag wider to look into it. He frowned, pulling out a grappling hook that looked well-used. He shot a look at his father as he put it down carefully on the desk. He reached in again and pulled out a dark blue sticky note, folded and creased awkwardly. He pulled it apart to read the black, scrawled writing properly:

**_To the Beautiful Detective with Eyes like Crystal,_ **

**_A Gift_ **

**_Love Always, Anderson_ **

Kurt flushed, his eyes stuck on the words. Taken aback, Burt was equally shocked as his eyebrows raised and his head cocked back.

“Uhh, Kurt?” Kurt almost jumped at the tone his father gave him. “I hope you know that I support you one- _hundred_ percent in being who you are.” Kurt blinked a few times and looked up to him. “I will always support you having boyfriends, and I promise not to scare them all off with the warning of a shotgun, but this…” He pointed to the note. “I don’t think this guy’s gonna be good for you in the _long-term_ , you know? Something about his attitude,” he joked fondly, "Or maybe his lifestyle..."

Kurt rolled his eyes and dropped the note on his desk. “It’s not like I _want_ him to flirt with me, Dad, he does it on his own! I don’t want the attention either!!”

Burt laughed softly. “I trust you, I trust you.” He headed towards the door, shooting Kurt a loving smile. “I know you won’t be—what’s the word, hooking up?—Hooking up with this guy anytime soon, but you know… Whatever happens behind closed doors isn’t so much in the eyes of the law…”

Kurt flushed to his toes. “Dad!!” he squeaked as Burt cackled and opened the door, leaving swiftly. As the door closed behind him, Kurt groaned in frustration, slapping his hands to his face as he turned to his desk again. After a few seconds, he parted his hands to look down at his desk. The grappling hook still sat there while the sticky note sat perfectly on top of it, reminding him of the special message for him. Sighing, Kurt picked up the note and stepped around to the other side of his desk. He opened the second drawer on the left, stopping for a moment as he saw a compilation of the other notes—including the letter he got earlier—Anderson had left him. All including the calling cards he’s collected over the years, including the one from today in the warehouse as well as the note from three years ago on the rooftop. Dropping the sticky note, he picked up one of the two he received that day and smiled at it.

_**See ya real soon, Detective** _

Kurt let out a huff of a laugh. “Yeah, I’ll see you soon.” He looked out the window to the darkening sky. “I’ll see you soon, Handsome.”

 

_File 2: Soo Matsumodo-Anderson_

_Soo Matsumodo-Anderson lived in the 12 th century of the Japanese Feudal period. During a transitional period of switching governments, many high-class families tried to cheat their way up the proverbial social ladder in order to get closer to the people in power.  Matsumodo was raised in a middle-class family; her father built weapons for the government during his daily life, but on the side, he invented devices used for criminality and thievery. Her mother was the only female samurai of her time, though her fame for being female was almost never noted. She often put on a guise of being male before doing her work. Soo’s father stole mostly from high-class families and used his own inventions to make his work easier. He raised Soo, his only child, to continue his work. He trained her until she was an adult, and they began to work together until he passed away well into her 20s. Her mother passed away soon after. Continuing his lineage, Soo snuck onto an export boat and made her way to England where she met and married Simon Anderson, a fellow, less popular, thief known only by his family’s prestige. Despite wanting to continue her father’s lineage, she took her husband’s name and continued his, comfortable in knowing his heritage would run far longer._

_She is known for inventions of her own. Due to the nature of her father’s business, she knew how to conceal weapons in innocent-looking objects. The most famous item to her name would be the six wooden fountain pens. Soo used Indian ink for the traditional half of the pens alone, but the secret hides within the pen in another manner. Upon twisting the end, the internal mechanism changes the ink type to a substance made up of mostly urine, diluted with water-like liquids. Applied to paper and allowed to dry, the ink is completely invisible to the naked eye. Recent technology has found that it can be discovered with Ultraviolet light, but if overlooked, it can actually be used to mimic watermarks used by money printing mints. If put in the wrong hands, such simple items can be used for terrible deeds._

 

Tina looked over Blaine’s shoulder as he read the old-looking set of papers. “What’s that?” Blaine inhaled slowly as he spread some out and offered her the one he was reading. “Soo Matsumodo-Anderson? Your ancestor?”

Blaine nodded. “Technically she isn’t an Anderson herself, but she was more notable than the man she married who _was_ an Anderson, so she deserved a spot in the book just like anyone else.”

“Soo is the reason we knew about the pens in Beiste’s bar,” Artie piped in, rolling up to them. “Blaine has a whole collection of family history basically chronicled in a book.”

Tina frowned at the papers. “Is this it?”

“No, these are police files. The police had a lot of files on my family. We used to own the book, but…” Blaine looked sat back, shaking his head. “My brother was supposed to have it. Five years ago, it was taken from him. Taken from us.”

Tina shrugged a little. “Well, I know all _that_. I’ve never seen these before.”

Blaine sighed and gathered them together. “Remember when we were up north a little? In the Upper East? Kurt had an office there, and he had a safe that supposedly had the book in it.” He straightened up the sheets, filing them all back in the worn folder. “Unfortunately, he didn’t have the book itself, but I guess they transcribed the whole thing—”

“—And added some things,” Artie cut in.

Blaine nodded to him. “I think they just added some context and… I guess a bias against us.” He scrunched up his nose. “Not like that really makes a difference or anything.”

Tina’s mouth opened in a small “o.” She gave Blaine a nervous look. “So where’s the book?”

Blaine pursed his lips. It took him a moment, but he soon shifted his weight. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “Like I said, it was taken from us. If Cooper was around, he might be able to help me find the people who stole it, but he…” He sighed, trailing off.

“Cooper’s your brother, right?”

Blaine nodded. “Yeah. He’s uh… a little incapacitated right now.”

Tina frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He’s in jail, Idiot,” Santana cut in. Tina turned to see her enter from across the room, her arms crossing in front of her. “We all knew that. Where the hell have you been?”

Artie rolled his eyes. “Tina was the last to join us, Santana. There’s a lot she probably doesn’t know about Blaine’s family.”

“In the last three years?? Please, even if you were the last person to join our group, you’ve had all that time to learn about his family like we have. You didn’t even know that his freaking _brother_ is in jail in California.”

Tina looked away, a flush of frustration washing over her face. Blaine put his hand on her shoulder before looking over to Santana. “It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t know a lot about my family. She’s been with us for long enough, and she’s done more than enough to help me put my family’s legacy back together.”

Santana rolled her eyes and stalked away. Blaine sighed and got up, taking the papers with him. Tina looked up and watched him for a moment. She bit her lip as Blaine slipped the pack into a large folder.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know, Blaine,” she says to him. Blaine turned around with the folder still in his hands.

“Why are you sorry?” he asked gently.

She squirmed a little, and Artie backed out of their mutual line of sight.

“Santana’s right, Blaine. I should know about your family and about, like…” She waved her hand in the air. “About your cause and stuff.”

“You do know about my cause, though,” Blaine replied with a smile. He stepped over to her and pulled her up into a hug. “Tina, you’ve done so much for me and my family.” Tina gripped Blaine around his waist. “Don’t worry about what you don’t know. There’s always going to be time to figure it out.”

Finally, Tina let a smile come over her face. Blaine pulled back from her to give her a wide grin. She smiled back before pulling herself away with a soft sigh. Blaine moved back to his desk and continued cleaning up, even as Tina watched him with an almost longing in her eyes: one of which Artie, half turned to his desk, absolutely took note.


	3. Chapter 3

        Kurt’s office was only slightly open. It was the kind of open that read, “I’m not incredibly busy, but I also don’t want to talk to anyone, and anyone who _does_ try to speak with me will surely have their respective genitals ripped out.” The wordless barrier kept almost everyone away: except for State Attorney Rachel Berry.

        “Kurt, we need to talk—”

        “Rachel, I’m not in the _mood,_ ” Kurt immediately cut her off, as if knowing she would burst into his office.

        She approached his desk anyway as Kurt sat by his, her entire form exuding her frustration. “Kurt, as incredible a detective as you are, and as close a friend as I am to you,” Kurt shot a warning glare up at her. “You need to do a better job at giving me _actual_ criminals.”

        Kurt tilted his head and frowned. “Beiste _is_ a criminal. She built an entire counterfeit rig under her bar and harbored other criminals—most of whom were hiding from the court or their parole officers.”

        “Criminals like _Anderson._ ”

        Kurt rolled his eyes and stood up, dropping his notebook on his overfilled desk. “Anderson is an enigma. His whole family is an enigma. I’ve been lucky enough to get close enough to _see_ him: I think that’s a lot better than most cops can say over the past five _thousand_ years or however long that _freaking_ family has been around.”

       “Well if you’ve seen him, you’ve been able to issue a profile for him, right?” Rachel asked hopefully, leaning on the desk on the heel of her hand.

       Kurt put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “… 5’10”, well-built… 150 pounds, I don’t know.” He flopped his hands down on his thighs as he looked to her again with moderate annoyance. “The same thing I filed a month ago when I had him on the roof of Radio City Music Hall.”

       Rachel snorted. “ _Had_ him, yeah,” she retorted sarcastically. Kurt tilted his head, the annoyance rising quickly. “More like he had _you_ : had you in your own cuffs and _flirted_ with you.”

       Kurt looked away. “He did more than that,” he grumbled.

       “What?” Rachel asked, cocking her head toward him.

       “Nothing,” Kurt brushed off, returning to his desk to lean over and open his lowest drawer. “Look at this,” he started, pulling out a large, awkward object and letting it drop on his desk.

       Rachel frowned at the claw-like object with a handle. “What _is_ that?”

       “A grappling hook. He gave it to me,” Kurt answered matter-of-factly.

       Rachel flicked her eyes up to meet Kurt’s. “Who did? Anderson?” Kurt nodded. She shook her head with confusion. “Wait, why? How? When, Kurt?”

       “Wow, four ‘W’ questions plus ‘How’, all in under ten seconds. I’m proud of you, Rachel, you really learned some clever inquiring skills from that fancy law school,” he threw back in a snarky fashion. She tilted her head and glared with pursed lips, now equally as annoyed. Kurt just sighed. “He must have left it in the bag I took off him when I arrested him, and I found it inside once I got back to the office with a note that said it was a gift.” Rachel gawked at him as Kurt poked at the tool.

       “… Are you going to use it?” she asked softly, almost hopefully.

       Kurt gave her an incredulous look. “ _Use_ it? Why would I use it?”

       Rachel shrugged. “Take advantage of the new tool you have. If he gave you a thing like this—something that, by the way, can be used to scale buildings like he does—it must mean that he almost _wants_ you to chase him. He’s practically _asking_ you to capture him!”

       Kurt laughed dryly. “Sure. Or he’s just pulling me into a trap.”

       Rachel shrugged again, sitting in the other chair across from Kurt’s desk. “Whatever you think he’s doing by giving you this, I think you should still take advantage of it. You don’t have to trust him to do that.”

       Kurt looked at her again. “I’ll consider that. Is there anything else you wanted? Now that you’re planting yourself in my office.”

       Rachel crossed a leg over the other, and it was like a switch: her entire demeanor changed as she grinned brightly. “I have a surprise for you.”

       With a suspicious tilt of his jaw, Kurt leaned up against a filing cabinet. “What is it?”

       “Not _what_ ,” Rachel teased, wagging her finger. “ _Where_ and with _whom_ ,” she corrected.

       Kurt rolled his eyes with a heavy sigh. “Not this again—”

       “Wait, Kurt, no, listen! It’s a Gala!” Kurt honked out a laugh. “Roz Washington is hosting a huge Gala for the police and justice departments, and _we_ are going.”

       “No we’re not,” Kurt threw back, stepping to his desk with a smile as he sat.

       “Yes we are! Everyone’s going to be there!” Rachel tried to defend.

       “That’s no incentive to me, I hate crowds.”

       “But _I’ll_ be there!” Kurt scoffed a mocking laugh again. “ _Kurt!_ ”

       Kurt sighed and dropped his head in his hand, his elbow touching down his desk, defeated. “Rachel, I’m so tired. I don’t want to talk about this.” Rachel looked rejected. He looked to her again. “… When is the Gala?”

       “Saturday night.”

       Kurt huffed out a deep sigh, leaning back in his chair. It took a long moment, but Kurt eventually replied, “Ask me tomorrow.” Rachel immediately brought her hands up to her face as she silently cheered. Kurt put his hand out to point his finger up as he glared warningly. “That does _not_ mean I’m saying ‘yes’, Rachel, don’t get your hopes up.”

       “Okay. I won’t,” Rachel promised, closing her mouth; it really wasn’t all that convincing. “I promise.”

       Kurt brought his hand back to himself as he shook his head with a sigh. “I need sleep,” he mumbled, mostly to himself.

       Rachel stood and went over to his side with a gentle smile and a motherly pat. Kurt looked up to her and expected a wise word or a sympathetic hand. “You need a _drink_ ,” she said instead.

       Kurt rolled his eyes and sat up, grabbing his notebook again. “Get out, Rachel.”

       Rachel tipped her head back in a laugh before heading for the door. She stood in the doorway with an expectant smirk directed at him. “24 hours, Hummel.” Kurt glared at her coldly. “Think long and hard,” she sang out before leaving and closing the door.

       Kurt shook his head as he bit the inside of his cheek, more amused than he wanted to be with his long-time friend. Due to that notion alone, he already knew the answer he would give her.

++++

       A thick and flat black wire shot across a tall pair of buildings. Half a moment later, a figure quickly slid across the opening and landed with a clean forward roll. Standing up, Santana almost immediately pulled out her camera as she stepped over to the edge of the building and knelt down, looking over the edge. She watched groups of people exit through a restaurant door, but she didn’t start taking pictures until a particular individual exited the building. Quickly, she began taking photos, sending them to Artie before packing her camera up and heading back to the cord she left on the other wall.

++++

       Artie rolled up to his projector. He pointed behind the others ahead of him to Tina whom stood by the light switch. Nodding, Tina turned off one set of lights, allowing for just the right amount of darkness in the room as Artie turned on the projector.

       “Alright, here we go, guys,” Artie started, slipping a photograph into view. Centered in the semi-clear photograph was a woman with short, stylized hair curled delicately over her forehead. She seemed to be in the middle of a conversation with a few other individuals in the photo. “This is Roz Washington. As of this morning, Tina found out that she has a great deal of Anderson history holed up in her apartment. We also found out,” he continued, sliding the photo out and replacing it with a photograph of the front of a rather fancy-looking building with a white overhang, “that she’s hosting a Gala for the police in the Grand Prospect Hall ballroom in Brooklyn.”

       Blaine raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that place, like, crazy expensive in this season? Aren’t there weddings and parties that are booked there, like, year-round?”

       Artie shrugged as he turned to Blaine. “I guess that’s just how much money she has.” Tina turned and gave Blaine a shrug. He just smiled back at her. “Anyway,” Artie continued, focusing back on the projection. “She’s putting up a lot of artwork in the Theatre. Think of it like she’s showing off—like a hunter mounts deer on a wall—and it’s going to be a perfect cover for us sneaking in and taking back what belongs to us: to Blaine.” Blaine smiled in appreciation when Artie motioned to him. Santana rolled her eyes. “So here’s the plan,” Artie went on, sliding out the photograph of the venue and replacing it with three photos of other apartments. “Stealing the paintings won’t be an easy feat. Roz has special security objects attached to the backside of each piece of art. Once they’re on the wall, they aren’t coming off until Roz herself shuts off the security system.”

       “What happens if you take them off without shutting down the security?” Blaine asked nervously.

       Artie inhaled and sighed. “I’m not sure. I’m assuming it has the same kind of inking system clothing and bank money has where it blows up in your face and ruins the artwork, but I honestly don’t know for sure. I wouldn’t test it, though, just to be safe. On that note,” Artie shifted the photographs to center one photo of an apartment. “Roz’s apartment is our best bet for finding the security system. It’s just a block down from the venue, so Santana,” Santana sat up a little upon being singled out. “We need you to get into her office and look around. Be careful, though. I’m sure she’s got her own security system you can worry about.” Santana nodded. “Okay, next,” Artie continued, shifting the photographs again. The inside of another, smaller apartment centered in the slide. “This apartment belongs to the person administering invites to the NYPD and the justice department. Brittany, I need you to sneak in and get at least one as well as a program for the event. We need to find out exactly what time the Gala is, who’s going, and what we can overall expect out of this event.”

       Brittany nodded. Santana looked at her with confusion before looking up at Artie. “Wait, why do we need an invitation?”

       Artie tilted his head in a sideways nod. “I was getting to that. Blaine,” he continued, looking to Blaine. “We’re getting you into the Gala. You’re gonna be our cover.”

       Everyone’s jaws dropped. They all spoke at once, letting out a mixture of demands, but Artie just put his hands out in an effort to calm them down.

       “Guys, guys, relax,” Artie hushed them. Eyebrows furrowed, Blaine tried to listen intently without having a problem with Artie’s wild suggestion. “We need someone on the inside to make a scene and distract Roz and keep her from checking on the artwork.”

       “And how am I going to do that?” Blaine asked.

       Artie turned his entire chair to level with Blaine, wearing a hesitant face. “Blaine. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… We need you to dance with Detective Hummel.”

       Blaine’s mouth fell open. Even as Santana stood and cheered, _screaming_ about him finally getting some action or something to that effect. “Hold on, is that really a good idea?” Blaine eventually asked, holding his hand up against Santana.

       “What’s the matter, Lover Boy?” Santana drawled, leaning over him in a vexatious way. “I thought you’d be _ecstatic_ to have a dance with the ‘Beautiful Detective’ you gawk over so much,” she teased, emphasizing the epithet with air quotes to mimic Blaine’s oft-used name for Kurt. Blaine just glared at her before looking back up at Artie.

       “Artie, there are going to be a lot of cops in there. Not to mention, Kurt might just recognize me.”

       “Yeah, well, whose fault is that,” Tina grumbled. Blaine gave her a look of betrayal, and she immediately gave him an apologetic look in response.

       Blaine turned to Artie again. “Artie, seriously. What’s your angle here?”

       Artie flicked his eyes nervously between his two friends. “Well… If you distract one of the best detectives in the city, you’ll also draw the attention of the Commissioner as well as the other high profile guests attending the event—”

       “Which,” Blaine interrupted, swaying forward, “as I said before, might cause Kurt to recognize me because he’s been as close as a foot away from me— _closer_ , really—so will this really be a smart plan?”

       Artie nodded decisively. “I think it’ll be fine. I think he’ll be too focused on the fact that a handsome guy is dancing with him,” Blaine began to smile a little at the compliment, “than the fact that the handsome guy is actually a major enemy in his career.”

       At that notion, Blaine began to feel something negative stir in his stomach. “… I don’t want to take advantage of him. I definitely don’t want to lie to him either. He already doesn’t trust me, and I don’t want this to come out later that I did this to him.”

       “Why’s it gonna matter?” Santana demanded, cocking her hip out as she put her hand on her other hip. “It’s not like he’s just gonna start randomly trusting you either.”

       “I’m not saying that,” Blaine threw back, giving her a look. “I’m saying I don’t want to actively lie to him in the middle of a time where I’m trying to get him to trust me.”

       “He’s never going to trust you, Blaine!” Santana snapped at him. Blaine was a little stricken by her sudden volume. “Why the _hell_ would he actually, seriously, trust you?! You’re a criminal, and he’s a detective. Him trusting you is like a zebra trusting a _lion_.”

       “It happened in ‘Madagascar’,” Brittany mumbled, but no one visibly acknowledged it.

       Santana continued: “If you honestly believe you can have a healthy relationship with that man, then Honey, you have made the _wrong_ career choices because that will _never_ happen.”

       Blaine gaped a little at Santana. Everyone stayed silent as Santana curled back and flipped her hair away.

       With that, Blaine nodded and looked up to Artie again. “I’ll do it. I’ll dance with him.”

       Santana scoffed, turning her head away. “Finally. Appreciate what you get when you can get it.”

       Artie inhaled, flicking his eyes to her as everyone else half ignored her, before turning back to the projector and fumbling with the photographs of apartments.

       “Uhh, okay,” he finally stuttered, centering the last apartment he had not mentioned. “Knowing that you’re going into a formal, we need to get you a tux. I found out that this apartment is owned by a guy who works for a fancy suit company. Not only that, but he’s been stealing many new suits from the store and then selling them for his own profit—I guess he thinks he deserves more money from the company, but we all know that’s not how it works.” He gave Blaine a smile.

       Blaine managed to throw back a smile in return. “Stealing from a thief. I like it.”

       “It’s really what we’re all about here, huh?” Artie replied with a laugh. “Anyway, we can start with those things today, so once we’re all back, be ready for another briefing because we have some business to take care of tomorrow.”

       Everyone nodded affirmatively before rising to move out of the room as Artie turned off the projector and returned them to the folder he pulled them out from.

       Tina chased after Blaine as he left behind the others. “Blaine, wait—” He stopped and turned to her as he pulled his gloves on. “Blaine, I’m sorry about what I said,” she started softly. She swallowed, looking white-faced and nervous. “I don’t really know what came over me, and I guess I was just… thinking back to that moment, and I… I don’t know—”

       “Tina,” Blaine interrupted her, “it’s fine.” He offered her a patient smile. “What I did on the roof of the Music Hall was… probably kind of stupid.” He looked back to his hand as he smoothed down the hem of the glove at his wrist, although absently. He paused for a long time before he continued, “You know, I really don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get this all over with.”

       Without another word, Blaine headed out, leaving Tina standing there with a heavy heart.

++++

       Santana gently began to pry up an unlocked window, though something in the track stuck the window, so with a grimace, she instead began to jerk the window, nearly breaking it as it rocketed upward.

       “Shit,” she whispered under her breath, almost surprised at the sudden give. She inhaled a thin breath before slipping into the building, toeing down onto the wood floor and gathering herself lowly. She scouted the apartment earlier, witnessing Roz leave, so there was hardly a chance of getting caught in this state. As she gently padded through the home, Santana peered over the sticky notes that scattered over almost every surface. _Punctual woman_ , Santana thought to herself as she turned her head and located a laptop. _Perfect,_ she smirked as she stepped over to it and opened it. She jutted her jaw out when she was met with an inquiry for a password. “Artie, I need a password,” she demanded, pressing into her ear.

       There was some rustling for a bit, and Santana let her eyes drift over the smaller sticky notes below the keyboard. “ _Uhh,”_ Artie responded nervously. “ _I don’t have anything on passwords, Santana,”_ he continued shakenly. Santana frowned as she located a blank one that was taped down, slightly hidden by other notes around it. She scratched at the corner of the tape and pinched the upturned corner, dragging it and the note back as it slowly revealed, written on the underside of the note, a series of numbers and letters, randomly capitalized.

       “Useless,” Santana muttered.

       “ _What?_ ” Artie tried to cut in, but Santana ignored him and typed the password into the computer. She smiled when the screen darkened for a moment before welcoming her. Artie continued barking in her ear, but she just tutted as she waved the cursor around.

       “Relax, turtle-face, I’m in. What am I looking for?”

       “ _I—I don’t know!_ ” Artie panicked. “ _Look for anything that looks like a remote security application. Or at least a document that might direct you to where the security system is or something—”_ He cut himself off, and only the sound of flipping through papers and insane clicking filled Santana’s ear. She frowned hard and began investigating all the files. None of the, sporadically organized, documents seemed to hint at the possibility of a security system. She opened a few, but they all outlined schedules from 2012 to 2015, all titled some amalgamation of “Summer Plans.” She opened the file from the past April, and even that did not hint at the plans for the fall.

       Sitting back, she closed the document and blinked as she let her eyes flick over the screen. Inhaling through her nose, she decided to open the Settings section. She leaned forward when she noticed a camera function she didn’t recognize. Selecting it, she came upon a blacked out, smaller screen and a list of other, selectable tabs. She clicked through them, but all the screens were black.

       “I think I found something,” she declared.

       Artie seemed to sigh out a cheer. “ _Oh, thank goodness. Okay, put a tracker in there; maybe I can shut it down from here.”_

       “This just looks like a bunch of cameras, Artie. They’re not on, but I don’t think it’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

       “ _Are you kidding?? Shit, okay, uhh,”_ Artie paused for a long time. “ _Oh—Did you bring any bugs?_ ”

       Santana reached into a small pack on her hip. She looked down as she pulled out a small plastic bag with an innocent-looking square of circuit. “Yeah,” she replied.

_“Is it a laptop you’re on?”_

       “Yup.”

_“Pick it up and turn it over. Unscrew the bottom and place the chip in the center of the circuit board. I can hack it from here and get more information out of her computer.”_ Santana pulled out a small screwdriver from her pack and began doing as Artie said. “Once you’re done,” he continued in her ear, “ _see if she has an office that can give you some information about the security systems for the paintings. That’s the goal for job.”_

       “Got it,” Santana declared as she fixated the small square of circuit into the computer. She fixed the laptop and put it back in place on the table before rising again and moving around the apartment.

++++

       Across the city, an apartment of equal size was the home to a very angry individual.

       “What do you mean you need 30 more?!” Principal Figgins all but screamed into his cell phone. He stood in his kitchen with one hand on his hip as he listened to the person on the other end of the call. “You told me I needed 200 copies of invitations and programs two weeks ago,” he managed to cut in loudly, his deep accent wavering with the stress of trying to keep calm, “If you were planning on inviting more people than that, you should have given me a bigger number. That way I would not have to spend more money for another round of ordering these copies. I cannot—” He tried to keep his jaw closed as he inhaled sharply through his nose after being cut off. He closed his eyes as he exhaled.

       Meanwhile, the front door of his apartment slowly and quietly opened. With wide eyes and low to the ground, Brittany poked her head into the dark hall. She kept her bright eyes on the bright kitchen to her left as she toed into the home, gently closing the door as quietly as she opened it.

       “I still do not understand how you could have made this error,” Figgins continued, “You obviously are not capable of putting together a gathering for so many people, and perhaps that is not your fault due to your gend—” He dropped the phone with a loud _clang_ —scaring Brittany—and somehow managed to hit the speaker button when the person on the other end started yelling loudly.

       “ _I hope you are_ not _about to say the word ‘gender,’ Mr. Figgins, because I will_ not _let you subject me to that kind of sexist discrimination.”_ Brittany took this chance to rush into another room and locate a stack of programs and invitations. She grabbed one of each and shoved them into her bag as the woman on the phone continued screaming. Figgins began to scramble to pick up his phone despite the fear and intimidation heavy in his stomach. “ _I am a proud black woman who has fought long and hard to be seen as an equal, but if I have to deal with another smartass comment like that from a little, sexist man, so help me God I will find your ass and slit ya’ damn throat—I’ll skin you alive, you heaving son of a—”_

       Scrambling to press a button on his phone, Figgins managed to turn speaker off as he brought the phone to his ear—only to pull it away and nod, closing his eyes, as the woman continued to yell at him. Brittany managed to sneak by the open doorway back to the front door. Opening the door carefully, she watched Figgins over her shoulder and began to slip out.

       “I’ll—I will do it. I am sorry, Ms. Washington, I will make 30 more copies—50. 50 more copies, very sorry.” As Brittany closed the door with an unfortunately noisy _click_ , Figgins turned around, thinking he heard something. He squinted over at the door, shaking his head and turning again as he continued saying, “No, no, it will not be a problem, I promise, Ma’am, I—No, not Ma’am, you are very young, Ma—Ms. Washington, I am sorry.”

++++

       A man approached the cream-colored door of apartment 206. He knocked loudly and definitively and waited with a pile of booklets in his hand. Inside, Ken Tanaka cursed and shoved a dark blue box under his bed and began to scramble out from half under his bed, hitting his head as he began to stand. Rubbing the back of his head, he headed towards the door. He squinted through the peep hole—only to see a fan of pamphlets staring back at him and waving gently. He rolled his eyes as a voice behind the door called, “We have some crazy new deals! This network is perfect for sports lovers!” Ken opened the door with mild interest. From behind the fan of advertisements, Blaine in his mask moved his head out with a wide, clenched-jaw grin. “You might want to lay down—these deals have made people _faint,_ ” he joked. Surprised and suddenly frightened, Ken froze a bit, providing the perfect amount of time for Blaine to drop the pamphlets and press a button on the wide plastic band on his wrist. From it, a small object shot out and hid the large man in the middle of his chest.

       His thin eyes stared in blank confusion as his face contorted slightly, and Blaine rushed to get behind the man and catch him as he fell back. He cringed, and his entire face went red under the weight of the man as he carefully helped him to the ground. Exhaling gruffly, Blaine rushed to grab the pamphlets and closed the door, organizing the pamphlets and placing them on a small table next to the door before squatting down to half-lift the sedated man and attempting to drag him down the hall.

       After a long few minutes of grunts and thumps—not the kind Blaine would ever imagine hearing with this man in the same room as him—Blaine finally ended up dropping and leaving the man only three feet away from the door. With his hands on his hips, Blaine breathed a little hard as he looked around the apartment. He knew he needed to find a suit, so he started with the closest room from the hall: the bedroom.

       Stepping inside, he trailed his eyes around the well-kept room. His eyes caught sight of a closet, so he moved to it and edged the sliding door open. He frowned upon finding regular articles of clothing, both hanging and folded. He pushed some of the hanging shirts to the side and pressed against the back wall, hoping there might be a false area, but he only sighed when it came to nothing. Drawing his eyes over the entire inside, he eventually looked down to find a small mirror propped up at the perfect angle to get a good look at his own shoes. Blaine hummed in interest, preening for himself as he turned his foot out, before he realized he could also see under the bed behind him, just a bit. It was enough to see a dark shadow of something large and like a container.

       Blaine turned and ducked under the bed, reaching under to drag out a large, black, closed container. He pried the well-used Tupperware lid off and grinned when he found a small pile of tuxedos, separated by article in plastic bags. He only frowned when there was no segment for jackets or ties. Peeking under the bed again, he located a smaller box and grabbed it, opening it and smiling again when it revealed at least a dozen colorful ties. He sat back, however, and considered where he would find the jackets that would go with these suits.

       Standing, he left the bedroom and moved into the living room of the apartment. His eyes scanned around the room for any possibility of a hidden spot. His eyes caught the tall chasse holding a rather small television, and it made him tilt his head in slight confusion. He moved over to it and tried to peek behind it. The wall behind it was slightly pushed out: he could see something like a seam. Immediately, he began to pull back the chasse and push it away from the wall. Putting his hands on the extended wall, he dug his fingers into the seam and pried it open, happily revealing a secret spot with a full group of hanging jackets. Blaine grinned and looked through it for his size, grabbed one, and returned to the bedroom to grab one of each item from the bin. He left it open as he went through the tie container, whistling at all the lovely colors, although dull. He managed to find a dark blue tie, and while at first he thought it was too dull, when he turned it in the light, he found that it had small and slight stripes in a different texture that ran diagonally downward. It reminded him much of his calling cards and thought it would be perfect alongside the dark blue, almost black, tuxedo he picked out.

       “Pretty good luck I’ve got,” he said to himself. A sudden sleep-snort made him flinch, and he looked toward the hall again. Realizing he had to start moving, Blaine left open the tie box before leaving the room, stepping over the sleeping man, and heading for the front door. A sudden burst of inspiration hit him when he passed a house phone, so he grabbed it and dialed.

       “ _9-1-1, what’s your emergency?_ ”

       Blaine put on a shaky, frightened voice, “Hi, uhh, I was coming home to my apartment, a-a-and my neighbor was on the floor, and he—” He swallowed, sputtering a bit, “—I don’t know what’s wrong with him, I-I need an ambulance, I think—”

       “ _Sir, can you tell me the address?_ ”

       “Uhhh, yeah, it’s apartment 2-206 on—in 101 West End Ave, Man-Manhattan,” he stammered out.

_“An ambulance is on the way, Sir, please stay where you are. Help is on its way.”_ Blaine affirmed softly. _“Sir, please remain in the apartment when the police arrive—”_

       “Okay,” he repeated, ending the call and returning the phone to the holster. “Sike,” he said to himself, leaning down to pick up the sedative from the man’s chest and dropping it in his side pack. He flipped the tuxedo articles over his shoulder before heading toward the door, opening it, and heading through, leaving it wide open. He looked back and nodded when he could easily see into the bedroom, his eyes meeting the stolen tuxedo bin and knowing the police would find it too.

       With that, he headed back down the hall and began to look for his exit.

++++

       Artie rolled back from his desk, taking his laptop with him, and moved towards another set of desks. Tina sat behind one of them, only staring at the top of the wood.

       “I can’t believe this security system Roz has. I can’t hack them until she turns them on, it’s… really weird to me,” Artie said absently, scrolling on his laptop as he put it up on the other desk. Tina sighed, but Artie half ignored it.

       “Do you think I’m useful?”

       Finally, Artie looked up to her. “What?” he asked.

       She furrowed her eyebrows and inhaled. “Do you think… Do you think I don’t belong on this team? I feel like I don’t do enough—”

       “Tina, Tina,” Artie hushed, turning fully to her. “You do tons for this team. Where is this coming from?” he asked.

       Tina pursed her lips. “I don’t do anything but complain. I complain about Santana, I complain about the jobs, I complain about—about Blaine _flirting_ with that Detective…” Artie frowned at the oddly specific example. “I just don’t feel like I even deserve to be on this team…”

       “But Tina,” Artie started, confused, “you went out with Blaine on the last job a few weeks ago. Don’t you think you did things to help him?”

       Tina tilted her head. “I mean, I didn’t do much…”

       “You found a secret entrance! An entire _basement_ Brittany could infiltrate!”

       “That was easy, though! Plus, you _told_ me that there would be an entrance like that; it was all a matter of walking around the building and looking for one. It’s so obvious, anyone could do it.”

       “But _you_ did it, Tina!” Tina turned to Artie. “That’s what matters! You did it well and _quickly_.” He rolled around the desks to sit right in front of Tina, taking her hands in his and holding them tightly. “If any of us thought you wouldn’t be a good fit for this team—Hell, if _Blaine_ thought you wouldn’t be a good fit for this team—do you think you would still be with us?” Tina began to smile a little. “Tina, you’ve been with us for _three years_. _Three years_.” He flicked his eyes between Tina’s. “You’ve been an incredible addition to this team. I promise.” With a smile, he squeezed her hands again.

       Tina began to smile wider, tucking her head in her neck as she squeezed his hands back. “Thanks, Artie,” she replied softly. “… I guess I worried about it after I said that thing to Blaine earlier… I do feel sort of bad for it.”

       Artie shrugged. “He’ll get over it. When have you known Blaine to hold a grudge?” Tina nodded, lifting her head to meet his eyes again. “It’ll be fine. Maybe if you tell him how you feel later after he’s had a chance to relax, he’ll be more willing to talk it out. He’s not totally innocent either: he really shouldn’t confront Detective Hummel as much as he does. Hopefully it just doesn’t come back to bite him.” Tina nodded again. Before she could say anything else, they both heard a voice in their ears.

_“Hey, Artie, I didn’t find anything on the painting security things, but I found a name for a person she labels as ‘Crazy Security Lady. Sounds legit to me._ ”

       Artie gave Tina an apologetic smile before putting his finger to his ear and backing away from her. “Alright, give me the name. Is there an address or anything with it?”

       As he wheeled away back to his laptop while discussing the situation with Santana, Tina turned in her chair to face forward again. Swallowing, she thought about what Artie said and considered what she would say to Blaine later.

       “Thanks, Santana. Get back to the Safe House, and I’ll get Blaine to pay a visit to…” He cut himself off, reading the name he typed in the computer. The screen showed an “About Me” page with an image of a doe-eyed woman with ginger hair. “Ms. Emma Pillsbury.”

++++

       Having dropped off the double-stolen tuxedo, Blaine had immediately headed out again after Artie gave him information about the next target. He sat up on the corner of a building facing an office with glass windows. He zoomed in with his binoculars as Artie spoke in his ear:

_“Emma Pillsbury has a day job as a therapist. For the last 20 years, her own paranoia has driven her to teach herself about personal security. At night, she builds and sells alternative security systems that go in houses or apartments or—in Roz Washington’s case—special artwork security.”_ Blaine focused on an office about seven floors from the ground. He could see perfectly into the ginger-haired woman’s office as she smiled and nodded while another individual—possibly a client—spoke to her. _“It’s not like anything anyone has seen, or so she says. It’s supposed to be 100% guaranteed to ‘protect yourself and what you love,’ but that’s just what it says on her website.”_

       “So she’s not some back-alley dealer? If she’s got a website for this, she must be pretty open about this… honestly _sketchy_ line of work,” Blaine mentioned in a low voice.

       “ _Not exactly. She doesn’t market her work during the day. She also doesn’t sell to just anyone: her biggest thing is that she needs to know the person, which makes it difficult for many people to buy from her. I’m not sure how it all works specifically, but all we need is the blueprints for the security system on the paintings. Get them any way you can.”_

       “You got it,” Blaine confirmed, sitting a bit more and pulling out a crossbow-like device and getting ready as he continued watching the woman through the binoculars.

++++

       “I’ll see you next week. Take care!” Dr. Pillsbury called as she waved to her last client before her shift was over. She closed the door with a nervous look, locked it, and flattened out her dress. She stepped over to her desk and pulled out a key from the inside of her shoe. Leaning out of her chair, she unlocked a drawer and pulled out a large folder practically falling apart. She dropped it on her desk to straighten it up before stepping over to her bookshelf and reaching behind a particular set of self-help books to press a button. The entire wall began to slide out slowly, and as it moved outward, she went over to the folder and picked it up, straightening it up in her arms. She rushed over to the opening in the wall and headed through.

       The next moment, a thick, magnetic cable attached to the metal between the top of the window and the bottom of the above window. Blaine slid down the cable from the opposing building and began to take out a glass cutter. Out of the corner of his eye, he began to see the shelves sliding back towards the rest of the wall.

       “Fuck it,” he murmured, kicking in the glass and shattering most of the window. He hopped in the office and leapt toward the closing wall, slipping through it just in time. Breathing hard on the other side, Blaine stared at the blank wall, awestruck, before slowly turning and looking down a thin hallway. He jumped when, five feet away from him, the woman he was looking for stood there with a wide stance, pointing a gun straight at him.

       “Don’t move, you son of a bitch,” she warned dangerously despite her high-pitched voice and scared, wide eyes and her overall unintimidating body type.

       Blaine shot his hands up in the air and tried to offer her a grin. “Nice to meet you too,” he stated, angling it more as a question. Emma just squinted at him silently. Blaine nodded and licked his lips. “Listen, Ms. Pillsbury—”

       “ _Doctor_ Pillsbury,” she cut him off, clicking back the hammer on her gun.

       Blaine blinked, keeping his eyes closed for a moment, before giving her a tense look. “Doctor, please. We both know you’re not just a therapist.” Emma’s nostrils flared as she furrowed her eyebrows. “You’ve been selling government-grade security systems to dangerous people: people like Roz Washington. You should know that Roz isn’t the woman you think she is. She’s dangerous: really dangerous.”

       “More dangerous than master criminals like you who break into my office and slip into my panic room?!” she demanded. Blaine looked around at the small enclosure.

       “ _This_ is a panic room?” he asked.

       Emma flicked her eyes around. “This is the hallway that _leads_ to the panic room,” she corrected nervously. Blaine gave a sideways nod of acceptance as she shook her head and bobbed the nose of her gun at him. “It doesn’t matter—Roz and I have been friends for years, she just wanted me to protect her artwork—”

       “Artwork she _stole_ from _my family_ ,” Blaine interrupted. Emma looked slightly surprised at that, but she blinked it away.

       “Stole from a group of thieves? Sure, like that ever happens.”

       Blaine laughed dryly. “You’d be surprised. I did it today. There was a guy who was stealing suits from a company he works in, and I stole one from him and turned him in to the police.”

       Emma inhaled and blinked, seemingly believing him. She swallowed and kept her gun on him. “I don’t have to believe you. It still doesn’t mean Roz is a criminal—it doesn’t mean she stole that artwork.”

       “I can prove it,” Blaine promised. “The paintings have a signature on each of them: it should say R. Anderson for Raphael Anderson.” Emma’s eyes widened, but Blaine continued. “He was a painter in the Italian Renaissance. If at any point you got a good look at at least one painting, you would have seen the signature. It’s always in the bottom, left-hand corner because he was left-handed—”

       “That’s B-S, there’s no way you can know that. Roz said she has had those paintings in her family’s possession for years—”

       “She’s _lying_ ,” Blaine continued, bobbing his head forward. “My family has had those paintings in our possession—I grew up with some of those paintings in my childhood home. I used to _stare_ at them because I thought I could teach myself how to paint like that, I’m _not_ making that up.”

       “And you expect me to trust you? Just like that?!” Emma demanded, “I don’t even know you! I _know_ Roz! She wouldn’t lie to me, she wouldn’t— _betray_ me!”

       Blaine inhaled and let out the breath roughly. Nodding, he dropped his hands. “Alright. You’re right. You can’t trust me.” He gave her an apologetic smile. “I’m really sorry for this. I know you’re very worried about people hurting you. I promise I won’t physically hurt you—I just hope you aren’t too emotionally hurt by this.”

       “By what?” she asked softly, furrowing her eyebrows harder.

       At that moment, Blaine swiftly pulled out a ball the size of a paintball and slammed it on the ground, creating a dense fog that rose up around both of them. Blaine immediately lifted a small mask from under his turtleneck and held it over his nose and mouth. Emma gave him a terrified look as she began to cough, dropping her gun as she stumbled and brought a hand to her throat. Blaine inhaled through the breather and rushed over to her as she fell, catching her as she lost consciousness. He lifted her in his arms and carried her further down the hall. He frowned at the door with a fingerprint scanner and juggled Emma’s body in his arms for a moment before managing to maneuver her hand onto the scanner. Her index finger just barely angled properly onto the greenish-blue square, and with a green blinking light and a cheerful “ _ding,_ ” the door unlocked and cracked open a little.

       Kicking his foot into the small opening, Blaine managed to edge the heavy door open. Once it was wide enough, he looked in and marveled at the secret room. If he could use one word for it, he would call it “clean.”

       There were two couches set up in a perfect right angle. A rug sat in front of both of them, the same exact color of green, and incredibly thinly woven. Easy to clean. On an adjacent wall, there was a small bed that was perfectly kept. Blaine went over to it and laid her gently over the cover. He hoped it would make her comfortable: he could tell just from one look at this place that she had some form of OCD.

       After making sure she would wake up comfortable, Blaine looked over to a desk behind one of the couches. A low filing cabinet sat behind it, and on the desk sat an overfull folder. He recognized it as the folder Emma was holding before sneaking down here. He stepped over to it and pulled out a handful of sheets of paper. He looked through it for a short moment but found nothing about security blueprints. Sucking his lower lip under his teeth, Blaine moved over to the filing cabinet and pulled the first drawer open. He blinked in slight surprise when he immediately found a whole pile of blueprints. Looking over some of it, he recognized home security systems and car alarms and mechanisms like the bookshelf outside this room that led him here. Sitting back, he continued filtering through it all, hoping he would not have to take too long.

       “ _Hey—Blaine?_ ” Blaine could hear Artie in his ear—but only barely.

       “Artie?” Blaine responded, putting a finger to his ear as he continued looking through the blueprints. “Artie, I can’t really hear you.”

       “ _Blaine—must be a—blocking the sig—st try to find—nts and get o—there._ ”

       Blaine tipped his head sideways, getting most of the picture. “You got it, Captain Static.” Almost as soon as he said it, he managed to spot something that was labeled “Washington Oct 14, 2015” Blaine smiled to himself and pulled it completely out, folding it and rolling it up. He fixed up the pile and closed the drawer, moving to the desk next to straighten up the other sheets of paper and return them to the folder before heading for the door. He gave a wary look to Emma still sleeping in the bed and sighed, hoping that this event wouldn’t scar her any more than she probably already is.

       With that, he left swiftly and managed to return to Emma’s office. He sighed at the sight of the broken glass next to the window and decided to carefully clean it all up.

       “ _You there, Blaine?_ ”

       “Hey,” Blaine replied, bent over as he used the blueprint to gather the glass into a pile. “I found the prints. I’ll be back to the hideout in a sec,” he promised.

       “ _Where were you just now? Some basement?_ ”

       “Uh, a panic room.”

       “ _A panic room? Were you panicking?”_

       Blaine laughed softly. “It wasn’t my panic room: it was the therapist’s. She’s a little paranoid.” Nodding to himself, he continued, “I guess she has every right to be now.”

       “ _Don’t worry about it. Are you heading back now?_ ”

       “Yeah, just cleaning up,” he informed, pushing the glass onto the blueprints with his foot and then stepping over to the small trash bin and sliding it all into it.

       “ _Cleaning up what?”_

       “I, uh… Made a mess. A little. I had to break the window to get in, and I feel bad. I think she has OCD too, so I—”

       “ _Who?!_ ”

       “The therapist!”

       “ _Blaine, it doesn’t matter! She’s one of the bad guys, she doesn’t matter. Just get back here!”_

       “I still care, Artie,” he shot back, patting the rest of the glass out of the sheet of paper. “People like Emma…” He thought about how scared she looked with that gun. “They aren’t bad people. They get caught up in some fear that comes from their past, and they do everything and anything they can to make the world a better place for others like them. They’ll even get in trouble for it because they think it’s the only way, or they don’t know any better.” He inhaled slowly as he looked around the office. “Emma’s innocent. She just wants to protect herself and the people she cares about. We’re not really any different.”

       The line was silent for a moment, making Blaine blink and hold his breath. _“Alright, Blaine. Just get back as soon as you can, okay? We need to start the next phase of our plan.”_

       Blaine smiled and went to the hole in the window and carefully climbed out.

++++

       Kurt frowned as he stared at the plans on his wall. “We need more people outside.”

       Behind him, Finn tipped his head as he let the hands in his pockets flap a bit against his thighs. “I still feel like that’s gonna be a waste.”

       Kurt tutted and flicked his head to the side. “If we put enough guards outside the venue, Anderson won’t have a way in. If he doesn’t have a way in, he can’t get to the paintings our client is worried about.”

       Finn let out a soft laugh. “Kurt, that’s not gonna matter.” Kurt turned around to him. Finn straightened up. “Look, he’s gonna get in no matter what. This guy doesn’t care how many guards you have. He’ll find a way in.”

       Kurt crossed his arms. “Then what do _you_ suggest?”

       Finn swallowed and brought his hand out to wave it up at the wall. “Just… Why don’t we put some guards near the paintings? Like, two per painting.”

       Kurt shook his head. “Washington already has security systems on the paintings, she said it herself.” He turned again and put his hands on his hips. “It’ll just be a waste.”

       “And since when are we just trusting our clients?” Finn asked rhetorically. Kurt blinked as he considered the question. “Either way, we don’t know anything about this security system. We don’t even know what it does if someone tries to take the paintings. It might not even work the way she wants it to work.”

       Kurt nodded despite not wanting to be wrong. “I need to get a good look at the inside of the inside of the venue. Then I’ll decide how we’ll put together any officers.

       Finn smiled slowly. Before he could say anything else, there was a knock on the door behind him.

       “Hello?” someone sang. Kurt and Finn turned to find Rachel peeking into the office with a wide grin. “Oh! Finn!” she greeted, somehow brighter than before, “… Hi,” she said softly, folding her lips together bashfully.

       “Hey, Rachel,” he greeted back with a similar smile.

       Kurt looked between both of them, annoyed. “Do I need to _give_ you guys a minute? In _my_ office?” he asked, deadpanned.

       Finn and Rachel looked at him palely. Finn swallowed and flattened his tie on his chest. “I, uh, should actually head out. I’ve got some work to do.” He started heading towards the door and smiled at Rachel again. “See you later, Rachel,” he said as he—and all of his disproportional-to-Rachel-tall self—stepped around her.

       Rachel grinned at him again and swallowed before turning to Kurt. “He smiled at me,” she said excitedly.

       Kurt rolled his eyes. “Alright, Miss Smitten, relax.” Rachel laughed again as she closed the door and headed to the chair in front of his desk to sit. Kurt stepped into his own chair and sat down, leaning back. He gave her a shrug with a raise of his eyebrows. “Need something? What’s up?”

       Rachel turned her head and gave him a playful look. “It’s been 24 hours, Kurt Hummel.” Kurt rolled his eyes again. “Are you coming or what?”

       Kurt’s mouth flattened in a terse smile as he swiveled his chair in a slow half circle. “I am, actually.”

       Rachel’s entire face lit up. She immediately began to grin wide, and it made Kurt want to shield his eyes from the sheer magnitude of the brightness. “Oh my god, Kurt, I’m so happy—I _knew_ you would—”

       “I’m glad you’re excited, Rachel, but I’m going for work. The person hosting the Gala requested some police support, and the Commissioner told me this morning that he wanted me there too.

       Rachel sighed. “Alright, that makes sense.” She immediately became happy again. “But, you’re still going either way, and you are still my date,” she stated, just as chipper.

       Kurt let out a laugh through his nose. “I guess so. What color tie?” he asked.

       With a thoughtful look upwards, Rachel pointed to him and said, “Orange. Bright.”

       Kurt flicked his eyes down her body with a slightly disgusted look. “Orange? On you? No, honey, never.”

       Rachel gave him a dumbfounded look. “What?! I look great in orange!”

       Snorting, Kurt tipped his head back and gave her a wide-eyed look with a smirk. “Yeah, and I’m secretly a Smurf,” he retorted.

       “Kurt!” Rachel squawked, “Do you really think I don’t look good in orange?! I wear it all the time!”

       “Rachel, no one looks good in orange—it’s why jails put criminals in orange jumpsuits.” He nodded, giving her a look. Rachel put her tongue on her lower teeth, looking away. Kurt sighed and leaned forward, giving her a gentler look. “Look, why don’t we go dress shopping tomorrow? We’ll find you a nice dress in… literally any other color.” He offered her a sympathetic smile.

       Looking up, Rachel glared for a minute before breaking into a smile. “Okay,” she agreed. “But why not tonight?”

       Kurt sighed and leaned back again. “I have to check out the venue: get a look at the paintings and figure out how many people we need on the inside.”

       Rachel nodded and moved her lips together. “Okay. Tomorrow we’ll go out.” She stood up then and threaded her hands behind her back as she moved for the door. “1:00?” She offered, turning again to smile down at Kurt.

       With a sigh, Kurt smiled and nodded. “1:00. Meet me here.”

       Rachel grinned again and left the office. Kurt turned back and forth in his chair a little as he watched her leave. Inhaling through his nose, he looked down and began to think about Anderson again. He turned and looked up at his wall of plans for this party. He only hoped it would go well.

++++

       Later that night, Blaine headed off towards the Grand Prospect party venue. Cautious as ever, the balcony door opened just enough to let Blaine slide into the small room. There was only one doorway just beyond him and beyond the small, dark smoking room. From here, Blaine could see a pair of guards standing on the other side of the separating walls.

       “ _Careful, Blaine, step out of that room, and you’ll definitely be caught by those guards. Just stay in the dark; you’ll still be able to get some photos of the ballroom._ ”

       “Got it, Artie,” he said lowly, carefully approaching the doorway and pulling out his camera.

       “ _Remember_ ,” Artie reminded in his ear, “ _You’re looking for major Big Wigs. I’m talking the Commissioner, Detective Hummel, Roz; anyone who looks important.”_ Blaine began to scan around the two floors of the ballroom. “ _Also, try to get a good look at the paintings if you have a good enough angle. I want to see all I can.”_

       Blaine silently confirmed the job and continued looking out onto the second floor where he could see some shadows moving behind the far hallway, blocked by a wall. He focused in on the left side as the Commissioner of New York City’s Police Department ambled out to look across the ballroom. Blaine took a quick photo of him just as a man a bit taller than him came out after him: followed, endearingly to Blaine, by the lovely and beautiful Kurt Hummel. Blaine sighed and smiled to himself as he took a few photos.

_“Easy, Stalker_ ,” Artie teased. Blaine flushed and stopped taking photos of the Detective once he realized he was _only_ taking photos of the Detective.

       He instead just watched Kurt and the other men leave with a happy feeling in his chest before catching movement to the right. He panned the camera over and zoomed out a little to catch the short woman from the photos step out and sweep her own eyes across the ballroom.

       “Is that Roz?” Blaine asked softly, snapping a photo and sending it to Artie.

       “ _That’s her_ ,” Artie almost immediately responded. “ _Eyes like a hawk, Blaine, watch out._ ”

       “You got it,” Blaine affirmed, getting another photo before another, much taller woman stepped out beside Washington. Blaine frowned. “Who’s that?” he asked, snapping a photo of them as they began to chat.

       Artie took a moment, but when he responded, Blaine could almost feel the fear vibrate in his voice: “ _Oh, Jesus, Blaine, that’s_ —” Artie sounded like he was scrambling a bit. _“That’s Sue Sylvester. She’s a warden in a maximum security facility in Long Island. She’s, like, no joke. I can’t believe she’s here, she’s—she’s very scary, Blaine, stay_ away _from her.”_

       “Noted,” Blaine replied, snapping another photo of Sylvester as she glared out across the ballroom floor. She and Roz began to move back down the hall, but Roz seemed to not quite be done standing around. Blaine watched her wave Sue away with a grin before turning and straightening up her leather jacket. As she turned towards the far stairs, Blaine could see her grin again as someone came up the stairs. Blaine frowned and tried to zoom closer, catching a photo of Roz hug a young man as he came up to her. “Hey Artie, do you know who this is?” he asked, snapping a few more of him once he parted from Roz and sending them to Artie.

       There was a long pause on the other end. Blaine could hear tapping and clicking, but otherwise it took another few moments for Artie to get back to him. “ _Uhh, nope. Nothing. I don’t even have a name.”_

       “That’s not good,” Blaine said, mostly to himself, “he could be anybody.”

       “ _He could be dangerous. We don’t know him; stay away from him too._ ”

       “Got it. I’m heading back,” Blaine mentioned as Roz and the unknown individual walked off together, his arm on her shoulder, and her arm on his back. Blaine put away his camera and turned around, sneaking back towards the door.

++++

       The store doors opened automatically as Rachel approached. With a large grin, she immediately headed for the dresses section. Unexcitedly, Kurt followed with crossed arms.

       “A _department store_ , Rachel?” he asked, slightly disgusted. "We're in _New York City_ \--literally _anything_ could be better than this," he said under his breath."

       Rachel gave him a playful look over her shoulder as she continued moving. Kurt rolled his eyes and hurried after her.

       As he approached her from behind, Rachel pulled a dress sideways, though keeping it on the rack, as she peered over it.

       “No,” Kurt declined it immediately. Rachel gave him a look, mixed between “Why?” and “Really?” He gave her a warning look before she tutted and dropped the dress, letting it fall straight on the rack. She moved down the aisle and gasped when she reached something with sparkles. “No,” Kurt trailed. Rachel closed her eyes before patiently dropping the dress and opening her eyes with a few blinks and moving on. She came up to the back wall and pulled out a light green and flowy dress. She immediately began to smile at it. Coming up behind her, Kurt leaned over to whisper in her ear, “No.”

       Rachel whipped around, now irate. “What’s wrong with this one?!” she demanded.

       Kurt straightened up. “ _Green_ , Rachel?” She gave him a defensive bob of her head, throwing her hands out. “You don’t look good in green,” Kurt continued with a sigh, “Trust me. And flowy? Frills? Are we going to a party for Nymphs?”

       “I thought you told me flowy dresses were in, Kurt!” she threw back.

       “Rachel, the _sleeves_ are what’s flowy; that’s not what _anyone_ meant.” Rachel folded her arms together and rolled her whole head. “No, you need…” he paused, walking down another aisle for a moment and looking over some dresses before completely grabbing out a long, midnight blue dress, tight at the top, strapless, and long, before finishing, “something like this.”

       Rachel blinked a few times as she stepped toward him, reaching for the waist to look closer at it. It sparkled just a bit in the light.

       “It’s perfect,” she marveled.

       Kurt rolled his eyes and handed it to her. “It’s not _perfect_ ; perfect wouldn’t be only—” He paused to grab the tag before cursing, “ _God_ ,” under his breath and finishing, “$39. My hands are itching just holding it.”

       “From wanting to wear it?” Rachel teased, grabbing the dress back.

       “From wanting to burn it,” Kurt corrected dully. Rachel laughed before turning around and rushing to the changing room. Kurt shook his head and followed with a sigh.

++++

       Cross-legged and examining the tips of his hair, Kurt sat in a chair outside the changing rooms. Hearing a door open, Kurt dropped his hand and turned his head to watch Rachel shuffle out and beam at him.

       “What do you think?” she asked with wavering excitement in her voice.

       Kurt smiled as he inhaled slowly through his nose and trailed his eyes over Rachel in the _semi_ -lovely dress. He tilted his head as she turned a bit for him with her hand on his hip.

       “Well,” Kurt stated in a high pitch, slapping his hands down on his knee decisively as he met her eyes again, “It’s not designer.” Rachel pouted and tried to look behind herself for the tag. “But it’s better than orange,” he finished with a playful smirk. Rachel grinned as she turned to him again. She started walking toward him as her teeth began to show before tripping on the front of the dress. Kurt leapt from his seat and caught her just as she began to fall forward.

       Laughing nervously, Rachel looked down to carefully step off the fabric of the dress and pull it up to keep it away from her feet. “Woops,” she breathed.

       Kurt gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, you’re gonna need heels too, Hobbit.”

       Rachel glared at him playfully before he helped her into the changing room again.

++++

       Kurt once again followed Rachel through an aisle—high walls held boxes of shoes with some displayed at eye level.

       “Have you been talking to Anderson?” Rachel asked suddenly, making Kurt freeze in the middle of a step. Rachel continued walking with a knowing smirk, peering over her shoulder to throw that smirk at Kurt.

       Kurt glared at her. “No, I haven’t,” he snapped, starting to walk again. Rachel hummed as she stopped to look at a shoe on display.

       “That’s too bad. I bet you miss him,” she teased.

       Kurt snorted. “Please.” He gave the shoe a short look to the heel. “No.” Rachel gave him a terse glare before moving down the line. “I’ll probably miss him when hell turns into a day spa.”

       “If the bigots are right, then that’s exactly what it is for boys like you and Mr. Flirt,” she tossed back. Kurt gave her a sarcastic laugh, but she ignored it with a pointed finger. “ _Actually_ , speaking of which, I heard that sex dreams are _much_ better when both parties actually _want_ to bang each other.” Kurt’s jaw fell open as he blushed a deep red, freezing again. Rachel just hummed to herself and continued moving down the next aisle, giving him another smirk as she passed him. Kurt’s eyes followed her before quickly following her.

       As he managed to catch up to her, Rachel was pulling out a box and opening it to reveal a woven wedge shoe. Kurt cleared his throat. Giving him a look, Rachel waited in silence for a moment before Kurt tutted, “Definitely not,” he croaked. Rachel hardly looked offended as she grinned at the state of his voice and put the shoe back. “Rachel, I _don’t_ have sex dreams about him. I’m not even _attracted_ to him!” It was Rachel’s turn to snort. “How _could_ I be attracted to him?! He wears a mask!”

       “That’s no excuse,” Rachel replied, inspecting a stiletto. “When I was seven I fell in love with The Hamburgler, and he wears a mask.” Kurt stopped next to her and stared at her, shocked and _very_ confused. Rachel looked up at him and shrugged curtly. “What? I was seven.”

       Kurt bobbed his head back a bit as he tried to understand what he just learned about his best friend. Unnoticing, Rachel offered the shoe to him. Kurt scoffed abhorrently. “You wish.” He pushed the shoe back onto the display. “That is _not_ meant for you.”

       “Who is it meant for?” she demanded with a frown.

       “Powerful women.” Rachel’s jaw dropped as her eyebrows quickly furrowed, insulted. “And by powerful women, I mean a Dominatrix.” He blinked. “Or Beyoncé.”

       Rachel kept her mouth open for another moment, but she seemed to accept the explanation before letting go of the shoe and moving on. Kurt continued to silently fume at the notion of interest in the con artist. As Rachel picked up another shoe, she turned to Kurt with a hopeful pair of eyes. Kurt could only stare blankly at the short heel, hardly recognizing it as a shoe at all. “Kurt?” Rachel tried, waving the shoe a bit in his face. Kurt blinked a few times and realized his mind was elsewhere. He met Rachel’s eyes, and she gave him an expectant grin. “You’re spacing out,” she informed him. “Thinking about Anderson?”

       Kurt clenched his jaw and shot his eyes away. “Will you stop talking about Anderson? I’m not thinking about him.” He flicked his eyes to the oddly lovely shoe, but upon noticing the height, he scrunched his nose. “Taller. That but taller.” Rachel nodded with a smirk and put the shoe back. Almost teasingly, she put her arm out to let Kurt look for a shoe for her. He inhaled deeply and started walking down the aisle. “I really don’t want to talk about this.”

       “Good point; let’s go back to the part where you want Tall, Dark and Handsome to nail you.” Kurt stopped to glare at the ceiling. Rachel patted his arm as she came up next to him. “You don’t have to know what a person looks like to dream.” Kurt slowly dropped his head to glare at her and shake his head. Turning to the wall next to him, he sighed and picked off a silver heel from the display.

       “This one. This one, and we’re done.” Rachel’s face lit up as she reached for it. Kurt dropped it in her hands and stomped off towards the entrance of the store.

       Rachel watched him and feigned sympathy. “Aww, I’m sorry, Kurt,” she cooed. He just whipped his head around to glare at her and put his middle finger up as she laughed wildly at him.

++++

       In almost a completely dark room, a bright light flickered on. Clearing his throat, Artie put his hands together in his lap as he looked out at his partners.

       “Alright, guys. We’ve got quite the run this time. The gala is Saturday—that’s tomorrow night. Last night, Blaine managed to sneak into the venue and take photos of some of the guests.” Artie put up a few photos and alternated between them as he listed the figures: “Roz Washington—Commissioner Hummel—A number of police officers—Detective Hummel—” Blaine smiled wide when Artie put up a beautiful photo of Kurt looking behind himself. “—and even a very revered character we haven’t dealt with yet.” He put up the photo of Sue Sylvester Blaine had taken as well as another, more official photo of her. In both photos, she managed to have the same amount of hatred and disgust in her face.

       “Who _is_ that?” Tina asked, leaning forward. Santana and Brittany exchanged a look as Artie answered her.

       “Sue Sylvester. She’s a warden of a maximum security prison in Long Island. She also has a hand in a similar prison in California—the same place they have Cooper locked up.” Artie flicked his eyes to Blaine, who gave back a worried look. Swallowing, Blaine looked away. Artie inhaled slowly. “Anyway, she’s gonna be there. Blaine, you gotta watch out. We don’t know if she knows what you look like, but I’m sure no matter what you’ll want to stay away from her.” Blaine nodded, keeping his eyes down. “Next,” Artie continued, removing the photo of Sue Sylvester before putting in a blueprint of the venue. “Here’s the Grand Prospect. Blaine’s getting in from the front—”

       “Ironic for the kind of guy that likes going in through the back door,” Santana teased. Blaine managed to crack a smile at the clever inference, and he turned his head to her to throw a grin. Santana smiled back, and to Blaine it felt like something of an apology for what she had said earlier.

       Artie shook his head as Tina made a noise of disgust. “Anyway,” he continued, “Santana and Brittany, I want you two to get in through a higher entrance.” He drew arrows in red on the sides of the venue. “We don’t have a schedule of the guard runs, but I know there will be a number of guards stationed at every entrance. These two sets of windows have balconies with enough room for only one guard. Santana, Brittany—I know you can do it.” Both ladies nodded affirmatively. “Okay, the last thing is…” Artie inhaled and closed his eyes, seemingly nervous. “… The security system.” Artie turned again and changed out the slide for a schematic of the security system Blaine managed to steal from Emma Pillsbury. “Tina and I studied this system pretty much all last night, and we discovered that the first thing to keep in mind is that it’s mounted. It goes on the back of the paintings, and it’s sort of small and lightweight, so you wouldn’t really know it was there unless you took it off the wall and looked at the back of the painting.”

       “So how the hell are we gonna remove them without setting them off if we have to take the paintings off the wall—thereby setting _off_ the security—to find them?” Santana asked impatiently.

       “I’m getting there,” Artie promised with a point of his finger and a quick look to Santana. He turned back to his projector. “The principle function of the security system is to ensure that the object being protected stays on the surface on which it was put when the security system is turned on. The only way to safely remove it is to turn off the security, but since we don’t have access to that particular function, we’re going to have to do it another way.” He put up a finger as if silently asking the others to wait a moment before rolling backwards and turning to head to his desk. The others tried to stretch to watch him as he leaned down and pulled out something paper-like but stiff. Artie made his mouth a flat line, creasing his cheeks as he held up the poster-like material before tossing it forward and letting it float onto the table. “The function, like I said, is that there needs to be something solid behind the sensor. We’re kind of going to have to pull an ‘Indiana Jones’ by sliding the paper between the painting and the wall and _then_ removing the painting.”

       “Will that work?” Blaine asked worriedly.

       Artie gave him a sideways smile. “I hope so.” Blaine’s lips quirked in an equally nervous smile. Artie sighed and looked back at his projection. “Well… That’s about it for the general plan I think. We have access to the cameras, so Tina will be responsible for camouflaging the feed so that security can have something to stare at.”

       Blaine nodded and inhaled as he started, “Okay, so I’ll be dancing with Kurt and essentially be distracting Roz, right?” Artie nodded, thinking about it for a moment. “And Santana and Brittany will be upstairs getting the paintings during that. Do we have a time window we have to consider?”

       Artie nodded with wide eyes, inspired suddenly. “Yes. We do. I was actually going to get to the breakdown. The Gala starts at 7:00pm. Roz will make the first toast to the police department, and a number of police officials will also be asked to speak. By and possibly before 7:30, the dancing will begin, mixed with snacking and mingling. That’s where you enter, Blaine. You’re going to have to do some serious bobbing and weaving if you want to get to Detective Hummel—there are going to be a _lot_ of people there. As long as you don’t talk to _anyone_ , you should be fine.”

       “Well I’m going to have to talk to Kurt,” Blaine continued, “He’s almost certainly going to ask me about my life, and I don’t want to lie to him.”

       “Oh, please,” Santana murmured, rolling her eyes.

       “We have something good going,” Blaine continued, “If I can get him to trust me in _this_ state, I might actually get him to trust me no matter what. Despite what the rest of you think, Kurt _could_ conceivably start to trust me. I firmly believe that if I gain his trust, he and the police force can very possibly start to help us, or they could at least stay out of our way.”

       “Let’s be real here,” Santana finally cut in harshly, “You want to _fuck_ that man,” she accused sharply, saying each word with their own emphases. Blaine clenched his jaw. “You don’t want him to trust you, you want him to fall for your little game and _maybe_ trust you enough to let you stick your hand in his ass—”

       “Alright,” Blaine tried to interrupt as he waved a hand, but Santana talked over him.

       “—But you need to understand that he’s not gonna trust you. We talked about this, you _dumbass_.”

       Blaine stood up abruptly. “I don’t care. I don’t care that you think that.” Santana let out a laugh. Blaine ignored her and looked to Artie. “Let me know when we have to leave.”

       Artie nodded silently and watched Blaine turn and leave the briefing room. Everyone else kept their heads down, all seemingly in thought.

++++

       Kurt and Rachel entered the ballroom side-by-side. Rolling his shoulders back, he kept his eyes on the crowd ahead of him while making an aside conversation with Rachel:

       “Remind me why we had to come to this. The Commissioner knows I hate crowds—and especially dancing.”

       Rachel gave him a sly look. “Just because he’s your father doesn’t mean you can get special treatment, Kurt.”

       Kurt shot daggers at her with his eyes. “I’m not asking for special treatment.” He flicked his eyes back on the crowd of well-socialized people. “I just don’t want to be here. Dancing and talking to people isn’t relevant to my work.”

       Rachel turned and stepped around to face him with a wide grin. “But Kurt, that’s just it!” He folded his hands behind him and looked down at her. “If we get close to people in this situation, we can get _in_ with them!”

       “In—Bed??” Kurt asked white-faced and fearfully.

       Rachel waved her hands. “No, no, no! Of course not!” Then, thinking on the prospect, “Well, maybe, but that is really neither here nor there. Just—” She closes her eyes and makes a motion with her fingers as if pulling a string out between her index fingers and thumbs. “Just try to have fun,” she continues, opening her eyes and smiling patiently, “Okay? It’ll be over before you know it,” she promised.

       Kurt inhaled slowly and exhaled with a small smile. He nodded, and they began to walk further into the room.

       Across the way, Blaine took a drink with a grin from the bartender. He turned around as he sipped on the glass, his amber eyes sweeping across the faces and figures in the room. Recognition set in when he saw Kurt Hummel walking with a brunette. The hiding con man watched the detective he felt so fondly for, considering how he would approach him in alias form.

       Committed, he slipped away from the table and wove through the crowd.

       Kurt smiled as he shook hands with Marine Corps officers and introduced himself to other detectives from other parts of the state. Suddenly, someone bumped into him, tripping from behind. Both men gasped and began to wildly apologize.

       “Oh—I’m so sorry—”

       “No, no, oh jeeze, I’m so—I’m such a klutz, I ran _right_ into you.”

       Kurt exhaled with a polite smile, facing the man. “It’s fine. Really.”

       With a dry laugh, the other man rubbed his neck and offered the hand to Kurt. “Look, can I buy you a drink or something? I feel really bad…”

       Kurt waved a hand and laughed softly. “No no, really! You didn’t even hurt me or—I should hope—spill that drink on me!”

       The stranger’s eyes widened and looked over Kurt’s coat. Kurt gave him a dangerous look, but the man soon smiled and nodded. “You’re absolutely fine, no worries.” Kurt sighed in relief. “And, to be perfectly honest, I still insist on repaying you for knocking straight into you.”

       Kurt giggled before he could stop himself. “Ohh yes, I would have certainly dragged some form of recompense out of you—and if you really want to pay me back, I’ll gladly take a drink or some food, or—”

       “—Or maybe a dance?” the man suggested with a silly grin. “Man, if only they were playing a Tango.”

       Kurt laughed. “Yeah, right. _That_ would be something at a party like this.”

       Blaine laughed with him and tucked his head. He looked up with a slightly sad look. “Well, if there’s no way I can do anything for you, then I guess I’ll let you get back to your night. Have a good one.”

       Kurt felt his heart sink a little as the stranger began to turn and leave. “Wait,” he called, stepping after him. The man turned and gave him a surprised look. Kurt turned red before clearing his throat and smiling a little. “Maybe just one dance,” he offered.

       Filled with excitement beyond just the plot of tonight’s happenings, Blaine grinned wide as he took Kurt’s hand and quickly led him to the dance floor, gathering a small yelp from Kurt as he let himself be dragged out. Kurt stumbled a little as they reached an open area: slightly away from other couples. The out-of-body image put in Kurt’s head made him flush again, but as he turned back to his partner, he began to feel a little calmer. They faced each other, and with oddly intimate gazes, the stranger placed his hand on Kurt’s hip, and Kurt gently laid his hand on the other man’s shoulder. Slowly, they began to move with the classical music. The whole time, they kept their eyes only on each other.

       “You’re a pretty good dancer, stranger,” Kurt flirted as the other man spun him slowly.

       “Thank you. So are you,” he whispered, dropping his hand a little further back on Kurt’s hip. Teal eyes flicked down to the drifting hand and flicked back up to meet amber eyes almost warningly, but the smile stayed as his hand came down onto the other man’s back again. “Plus,” the man continued, almost impossibly softer as he stopped moving alongside the music, “It helps to have such a beautiful partner to inspire me.”

       Kurt’s mouth fell open as the music swelled again, and they began to move together once more. Then, as they continued to dance, they couldn’t even begin to notice that other people were beginning to move away from the center of the dance floor.

       The music slowed to a stop. Blaine pulled back a little to bow for his partner. Kurt brought a hand to his mouth as he tried to hide the wide, surprised grin stretching his face. To his own surprise, the band crashed a jazzed series of notes that were indicative of a dance widely known as… a Tango.

       Amber eyes flicked sharply up towards the taller man. Kurt looked down at him with incredulous eyes. The stranger rose again and offered his hand again. Kurt sighed but took it with a grin. The stranger snapped Kurt’s body close with the music, both of their eyes dropping to their lips, so close with the heat of the dance. At about the same time, the men dragged their eyes up to meet as Kurt slid his leg out in typical tango fashion. Together, they swung in snappy motions, keeping hard gazes on each other.

       “It occurs to me that I never asked for your name,” Kurt reminded, letting Blaine swing him around once.

       The other man hummed. “It appears that you never did.”

       Kurt chuckled, his grin returning. “I should rephrase that. Can I _get_ your name, Mister?”

       The stranger grinned. “I’m Blaine.” The violins crescendo-ed sharply as he snapped Kurt down, making him recline in his arms as he held Kurt’s other hand up and out, their faces close.

       “Kurt,” he whispered breathlessly. Blaine grinned and brought Kurt back up as the music continued.

++++

       Upstairs, the music was muffled as Santana snuck up behind one of the roaming guards and snuck a cloth doused in a sleeping agent onto his face. With little struggle, the man passed out in her arms, and she helped him down to the floor. Down the hall, she could see Brittany copy the same move on the only other officer in this section. She smirked to herself before heading over to the center doors and pulling them open.

++++

       Their bodies were close again as they danced as if they’ve been dancing for years: swinging around each other in the dance. Kurt took advantage of his inexperience by surprising Blaine with arousing moves between bits of conversation. “So what do you do?” he asked as he parted from him to strut around Blaine, trailing his hand over his shoulders.

       “For work? To be honest, I’m out of a job right now, unfortunately. I live with some roommates, but—” He gasped sharply as Kurt came back around and moved a hand down his chest before taking his hand again. Blaine met his eyes with a dark smile as he wrapped his arm around him again. He continued from where he left off, “But right now, sadly, I’m in a bit of a pickle.” He finished it off with a wink. Kurt smirked as the music led them both to stomp—and _spin_.

++++

       Meanwhile, Santana and Brittany began slipping the thick sheets of paper behind a painting before swiftly removing it from the wall. She knelt on the floor and had Brittany hold the paper down as Santana put her head down to peek under the paper and work to disarm it with her thin pliers. After completely disarming it, Santana sighed and sat back as Brittany carefully pulled back the sheet of paper. When nothing bad happened, they both smiled at each other before Santana pulled up the security system and tossed it aside. They gave each other flirty looks before starting on the rest.

++++

       “Kurt, right?” Blaine continued, “You wouldn’t happen to be Kurt Hummel, would you?” Blaine asked curiously.

       Kurt turned his head with interest. “How do you know my name?”

       Blaine grinned. “I have a friend who works in the police department. I’ve heard that you’re a pretty incredible detective.”

       Kurt blushed at the compliment. “I’m not the best, but thank you,” he said as he tilted his head bashfully. Blaine spun him around again as the music warranted them to slide their arms together and outwards. Blaine took Kurt’s hand again and spun him towards him, Kurt’s back now flush to his chest.

       “I hope your investigations are going well,” Blaine whispered as he ran his hands down Kurt’s chest and sides. Kurt had to bite his lip to keep from letting out a sound—lest he moaned from how _hot_ this dance was with this man who was still sort of a stranger to him.

       Even despite that, Kurt trailed a hand up and over Blaine’s cheek as he slid his leg out and let his body lower, whispering, “They are, mostly,” before continuing, his hand trailing over Blaine’s neck before snapping up and spinning around to face him again. Blaine snapped him close again. Kurt flicked his eyes over Blaine’s face. His mouth flickered with a smile. “But that’s really neither here nor there right now, huh?”

++++

       Brittany patted her hands together as Santana cracked her neck and stretched her shoulders back. A pile of paintings was neatly stacked in front of them, and next to them, a burnt-out pile of the circular security systems. The ladies exchanged a look.

       “What?” Santana asked with a frown.

       Brittany very obviously tried not to grin, but as she fixed her heavy-duty gloves, she had to look down with flush cheeks. “… Nothing,” she murmured.

       Santana tilted her head and put her hands on her hips. “You sure?” she asked playfully, stepping toward Brittany to reach for her hair and flick her ponytail.

       Brittany turned her head away with a cheeky grin. Santana smiled wider and trailed her fingers over the back of Brittany’s neck and down the top of her back. Almost despite herself, Brittany finally looked up and met Santana’s eyes.

       “Just watching you bend over and break the security thingies just…” She flicked her eyes down, “… reminded me of something else…”

       Santana narrowed her eyes and tilted her head as her jaw dropped. After a moment, she close her mouth and flicked her hair away as she brought her hand down over Brittany’s arm.

       “Well,” she said lowly, flicking her eyes down Brittany’s front, “I guess when we get out of here, we can,” she flicked her eyes up to meet Brittany’s, “make that little imagination a reality.”

       Brittany flicked her eyes over Santana’s face with a hopeful glint in her eyes. Without another word, they pushed together in a kiss. Santana moved her hand to Brittany’s back and began to reach further down, gripping her lover’s backside with a grin against her lips. Brittany hummed out a laugh and pulled back with an equal grin.

       “Let’s go,” Brittany whispered, pecking Santana on the lips again before hopping out of her arm. Santana grinned after her before stepping over and helping her haul the paintings into a large bag.

++++

       Blaine grinned as they swung around a few more times. Then, as if they could tell the music was going to come to a stop soon, Blaine spun Kurt around twice before pulling him back and, with the violins coming to an almost abrupt end, Blaine swung Kurt down into his arm again, holding his other hand close to his face as both of their faces came together almost closer than that. Kurt couldn’t tear his eyes away from the beauty of Blaine’s amber eyes, even as he started to hear a wash of noise that went almost deaf on his blood-rushed ears. Blinking, Kurt soon realized that the washing noise was applause. Blaine let him stand up as the both sort of awkwardly looked around at the crowd of people staring at only them and clapping. Kurt reached up to pretend to smooth his eyebrow as he turned to Blaine and stammered a little, “Uhh, I’ll—I think I’ll take that drink now.”

       Smiling, Blaine nodded and put his hand on Kurt’s shoulder, leading him back towards the tables.

++++

       The pair talked for a long time as others started to fill the room more evenly again.

       “So I tell him, ‘Coop, you understand what it means to want to get in bed with a guy, right?’” Kurt laughed, shaking his head. “Yeah! And he goes, ‘Hey, man, just because I like thinking about getting nailed by hot guys doesn’t mean I _like_ guys, man!’ Like _crazy_ against even _thinking_ he could be bi or something.”

       They both laughed, finding the entire story hilarious. “And he was serious?” Kurt asked through a tearful laugh, running a finger under his eye.

       Blaine huffed another laugh as he swallowed. “Uhh, yeah! Well, no, because he is bi, and he told me, but I think this was before I knew,” he replied, the lilt in his voice making the statement almost sound like a question. He tilted his head and laughed again with Kurt.

       They continued to laugh, though they slowed to a stop as someone approached them. The boys looked up as an older man put his hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “Kurt,” he greeted with a small smile.

       Gaping, Kurt straightened up and cleared his throat. “Commissioner!” Flicking his eyes to Blaine, he held a hand out. “Commissioner, this is Blaine. Blaine, this is Commissioner Hummel.”

       Blaine seemed to look surprised. “Hummel?” He pointed at the two men. “Are you two—related?”

       The Commissioner laughed. “Yeah, he’s my son.”

       Blaine raised his eyebrows with a smile. “I see! That’s not anything like a conflict of interest, is it?”

       Kurt sighed as the Commissioner explained, “No, Kurt works for the state, but we employ him cases. The police are employed by the city. My son, here, only _sort o_ f works for me,” he teased as he looked down at his son, grinned, and shoved his shoulder playfully. Kurt turned to smile at Blaine apologetically.

       Blaine grinned as he met Kurt’s eyes. “Fascinating.” Kurt shook his head with an embarrassed smile. “And now that I know the father of the man I danced with tonight was in the audience,” he started, dropping his eyes down and raising his eyebrows, “I probably wouldn’t have had him dance so…” He trailed off and looked up at Kurt in a similar apologetic manner. “… _Suggestively._ ”

       Kurt’s face flushed deep red when he remembered the tango from earlier. Burt Hummel laughed and brought his hand hard against Kurt’s shoulder, making Kurt start a little. He and Blaine made eye contact as Burt seemed to be the only one not feeling awkward about the situation. “My son’s an adult, buddy. I think I can handle him dancing a little ‘suggestively’,” he raised his hands up to make air quotations, “so long as you kids keep your clothes on until you get some privacy.”

       “Oh my god, Dad!” Kurt shrieked, his hands shooting up by his face to shake with fear and embarrassment.

       Burt laughed and patted Kurt’s shoulder again. “Well, I gotta run. Blaine, it was nice to meet you.” He offered his hand to Blaine, and the younger man shook it with a grin.

       “Nice to meet you too, Sir,” Blaine replied. Burt patted Kurt on the shoulder with a softer smile and decidedly left the pair.

       Kurt sighed and turned to Blaine again. “I’m _so_ sorry about that.”

       Blaine looked surprised. “Why are you sorry?” he asked with a grin still on his face. “That was great. I’m glad he didn’t skin me for making a nasty man out of his son.”

       Kurt flushed yet again with a wide grin as Blaine laughed to himself. Looking up again, Kurt let his own grin emerge. They kept their eyes on each other for a weird, long moment until Blaine dropped his gaze. “I… guess it is getting kind of late.” He checks his watch with a frown. “Wow, we’ve been talking for almost an hour and a half.” He laughs and looks up to Kurt again. “Here I thought I’d be bored forty minutes into this shindig.”

       Surprised himself by how long they’ve spent talking, Kurt gaped a little. “Yeah, wow… I… sort of didn’t even want to be here at first, but…” He smiled. “I’m glad I came.”

       Amber eyes darkened over a sly smile, dragging slowly down and up Kurt’s face. Bright blue-green eyes widened under the deep gaze. “I’m glad you came too,” Blaine replied in a low voice. Kurt watched him with his mouth still a little open. After a second, Blaine licked his lips and dropped his eyes. “I should go. Get home safe, Kurt.” He looked up again to smile. “I’ll see you soon.”

       He winked and rose from the seat. Kurt watched him leave, relishing for a moment in how good he felt after that whole exchange. Suddenly, he heard a high pitched _something_ coming from behind him. He turned to find Rachel hurrying up to him and squatting, squeezing his arm excitedly. He smiled down at her as she squabbled wildly:

       “Kurt!!! Oh my god!! Oh my _god_ , he was so _cute_ , Kurt!”

       Kurt knew he had a wide grin but felt he didn’t have to mask it to her. “Yeah. He’s pretty cute.”

       “What’s his name??”

       “Blaine,” Kurt drawled happily, loving how the man’s name sounded on his tongue.

       Rachel’s squeal rolled slowly out of her mouth. Kurt turned fully to her and grinned as she took his hands in hers, equally excited.

       “Did you get his number??” Kurt’s excitement drained with his color. Rachel’s grin dropped too. “Kurt,” she started warningly.

       Gaping, Kurt shook his head. “I… I forgot. I can’t believe I _forgot_ , oh my god, I forgot…” He groaned, dropping his head in his hands.

       Snapping back into it, Rachel patted his arms quickly. “It’s—It’s fine. I’m sure you’ll see him again. He lives around here, right?? How hard is it to see one man in this city??”

       Kurt slowly raised a cold gaze to Rachel. “In a city full of over 500 _thousand_ people?” he deadpanned.

       Rachel flicked her eyes away and smiled awkwardly. “Maybe?”

       Kurt groaned again and dropped his head.

       Suddenly, they heard the sound of a microphone squeaking. They both jerked to cover their ears as, from across the room, Roz Washington held the microphone away from her face with disgust. Once it managed to stop squealing, she brought it back to herself.

       “Oh my god,” she exclaimed with a frown, “This shit is _loud!_ Anyway, it’s 9:30, so we’re all gonna head upstairs so I can show you all my art collection. Head up those stairs, ya’ll!”

       Kurt and Rachel looked at each other and shrugged before turning and following the crowd of people heading upstairs.

++++

       Somehow, they managed to get relatively close to the front of the line as they reached the top of the stairs. Kurt was able to spot Roz squeezing through the crowd on the other end of the hall. He frowned when she started looking around, wondering what she seemed to be looking for over the crowds. With a shrug, she moved to the center doors and gave the crowd a wide grin before turning and pulling open the doors. Kurt immediately saw her whole aura change as she froze in the doorway.

       A number of people walked up and tried to peek into the room, and Kurt managed to push himself out between some people as others began to follow Roz into the room. As Roz moved out of his line of sight, Kurt’s stomach dropped.

       In the center of the room, sitting delicately on top of a broken set of technology that looked like smoke detectors, was a calling card in the shape of a bird.

       “Anderson,” Kurt whispered under his breath. Rachel came up next to him, looking around. She gasped when she saw the calling card as well. Kurt looked to Roz and watched her put her hands on empty parts of the wall.

       “They took them,” Kurt heard her say. “They took all of them.”

       Kurt felt a prickling on his neck and turned around suddenly. Burt stood a few feet behind him and gave him a clueless look. Kurt sighed and dropped his eyes before turning around and stepping up to the pile of broken electronics. He knelt down and carefully picked up the card and turned it over.

_**See you soon, Beautiful.** _

Kurt blushed and brought the note close to himself when Roz tried to look at it. Swallowing, Kurt slipped the card into his inner jacket pocket and turned around, taking Rachel by the arm and leaving the room.

++++

       “ _Yes,_ Finn, you were right,” Kurt admitted tensely into his phone as he unlocked the door to his apartment. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you, okay?” He sighed as he dropped his keys in a tray by the door and kicked the door closed behind himself. “Look,” he said after a moment, “It’s been a long day. I’ll be at the office tomorrow, and you can make fun of me all you want, but right now, I just want to get this tuxedo off and go to bed.” After another snide comment from his step-brother, Kurt smiled to himself and replied, “Good night, Finn,” before ending the call and putting his phone down on the coffee table in front of his couch.

       Sighing, He pulled off his jacket and draped it over the arm of the couch. Feeling around his pockets for his phone, he frowned when he felt something sharp in his back pocket on top of his wallet. He pulled out his wallet and turned it over to find a folded piece of paper, slightly creased from being stuck there possibly all night.

       Dropping his wallet onto the cushions, Kurt pulled apart the folds, and immediately he began to smile. Written in handwriting he could not help but melt under, was:

_**Thanks for the dance, Gorgeous. I would have kissed you if I could. You looked beyond incredible in the suit. The blue in your tie really matched my suit, but I don’t think I noticed that until I started writing this. If you’re wondering when I wrote this, don’t worry, I wasn’t watching you from across the room. That… would be weird. Right? Yeah, super weird. Anyway, I’ll see you around. Probably. Thanks again for humoring me with the dance.** _

       Then, lower on the page, Kurt bit his lip when he read:

_**P.S. You’ve got a Sweet ass, Detective Hummel.** _

       Kurt let his arm drop as he moved his lips together in a red-faced grin. He swallowed and turned a bit for lack of a better thing to do with his fluttering body.

++++

       Blaine arrived at the Safe House with a happy grin on his face: one he had not been able to wipe off since dancing with Kurt. One hand still in his pocket, he opened the door into the main atrium, happy to see his friends waiting for him with a set of paintings waiting on the table. Artie rolled up and gave Blaine a proud smile.

       Blaine nodded and went over to the set of paintings. He traced his hand over the gold-colored frame on one of them, his fingers dipping into the gorgeous filigree. Tina came up around the table and smiled at the paintings.

       “They’re beautiful. Your ancestor was a really spectacular artist.”

       Blaine nodded and licked his lips. “Yeah, he was.” As he traced his finger across the inner bottom of the painting, he stopped somewhere near the middle. Abruptly, he gripped something and tugged the canvas upward—shocking everyone else around him.

       “Blaine, what the hell are you doing?!” Santana exclaimed. Blaine continued to tug up the canvas, not ripping the fabric but loosening it from under the inner edges of the frame.

       “Many people that lived in the Renaissance Era were known to have many talents. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci… They’re famous for more than one kind of artwork.”

       “It’s why they’re called Renaissance Men,” Artie cut in softly, still staring solemnly at the ripping canvas backing.

       Blaine looked to him with a smile. “That’s right.” He inhaled slowly. “The man who painted these is Raphael Anderson. Like Da Vinci and Michelangelo, he had some other talents he was known for as well as painting.” With a smirk and a final tug at the canvas, Blaine slid his hand across the backing and tugged out a small, folded up piece of parchment. He unfolded it and showed the pristine, thick pencil lines that formed something like a large, circular door. The others gawked at it, confused and impressed. “He was also an architect.”

       Artie slowly rolled up to him, agape, as Blaine handed him the drawing. “Oh my god, Blaine, this…” He trailed off as he checked the legend on the side and eyeballed the measurements. “… This is incredible. How many other places like this did he design?”

       “Just this one,” Blaine replied, moving to the next painting and beginning to tear out the canvas. “He built this building only, and it had just one, really important job.”

       “What’s that?” Tina asked.

       Blaine finally pulled up the canvas with a grunt and pulled out another folded up piece of parchment. Unfolding it and turning it in his hands, he peered at it before grinning wider. Turning it to face the others, he gave them the same grin. “It’s a vault. A Treasure Vault. It holds everything my ancestors have ever purveyed and stolen over the _millennia_ we’ve been around.” As Blaine began pulling out another canvas and pointed to Tina and Brittany to do the same. “Be gentle, guys,” he urged them before continuing. “Before Raphael built this vault, my ancestors had to hoard their items and pass it on to their next of kin. Needless to say, thousands of years of passing on tons of riches gets to be a little heavy.”

       “Not to mention easy to lose,” Santana sympathized, aweing at the internal designs of the vault. She shared a dangerous, knowing look with Brittany next to her.

       “Right,” Blaine agreed, not noticing the look as he helped Tina pull out the secret sheet of parchment in another painting. “Given that, he built it to hold everything we need to keep safe.”

       “How has it not been robbed before?” Artie asked as he began collecting multiple sheets.

       Blaine smiled wider at Artie. “That’s the best part. There’s a special key. A key that’s been passed down from generation to generation.”

       “A key?” Santana asked, almost too interested.

       The smile on Blaine’s face dropped as he looked to her. “Well… The last person to have it was my mother. She, I think, gave it to my brother.”

       “And your brother is in California,” Santana finished for him, nodding wide and dropping her head. “Sucks how much he seems to inherit everything and manages to get freaking busted.”

       Blaine nodded in response, raising his eyebrows in agreement. “Yeah, exactly... Right now,” he continued, handing the last two sheets of parchment to Artie, “the best we can do is keep these plans safe. Eventually, we can figure out where it is and how to get to it. This,” he said, waving his finger at the parchment pile in Artie’s lap and smiling at his friends again, “is just the first step, guys.”

       Everyone stayed silent, still in awe from such a discovery. Eventually, Blaine started fixing the paintings, returning the canvases to their prior states. Still awestruck, Artie straightened up the pile and began rolling toward his desk, immediately working on something.

       After another moment, Santana looked to Blaine. “So do you know where it is?” she asked.

       Blaine shook his head as he and Tina fixed up the last few. “Nope. It’s really not in my top priorities right now. As long as everything is in the vault, everything is safe.”

       “How do you know someone else hasn’t… found it first?” Santana asked nervously.

       Blaine gave her a look. “No way. You can’t break into this place. Not even if you try to take out the earth it sits on.”

       “And what if someone got the key?” Santana continued.

       “I highly doubt it. I’ve never even seen it. Cooper has it somewhere safe.” He patted the last, fixed painting. “I’m sure of it.”

       With that, he gave Santana a sure smile before turning and moving out of the atrium. Biting the side of her lip, Santana looked over to Brittany knowingly. Brittany shot back a similar look with a slight nervousness behind her eyes.

_File 2: Raphael Anderson_

_Raphael Anderson was alive during the Italian Renaissance of the 16 th Century. Having grown up in the port city Ostia, Rome, Raphael was a brother to three other children. Over his child life and watching himself and his siblings be bequeathed sets of family heirlooms, he realized there had to be a better way of passing on family history. He was aware that there were different safe places around the world, and at different parts of their lives, his family would meet somewhere across the continent to catalogue everything and keep it all together. Raphael regarded this process as inefficient and risky and left many family members open to be stolen from. He began working as a home builder, inventing ways to practice security for homeowners, including raising the level of window holes in order to discourage thieving intruders as well as hiding financial documents in parts of the walls so the homeowner could keep sensitive information safe. His tactics spread across the city and even the neighboring cities, and he quickly became well-known if only within Ostia alone._

_Raphael grew up under his own slight fame, and he spent years of his young life designing new types of buildings—places in which one would not necessarily live with a family, per se. These complexes were more for the use of storing things of importance and adding to them unassuming security functions. Eventually, he came upon inspiration for a design larger than any design he had invented. Driven to build it, he and members of his immediate family scouted a location and built the design: The Vault. It took nearly a whole lifetime, and by the time it was completed, Raphael was an older man well past the age of marriage and child-raising. This was apparently a preference for him, and he was comfortable living alone with the prospect of seeing his siblings and their children._

_Realizing he needed to make the Vault a usable structure to only the family, he constructed a special key and gave it to his siblings with the intent to pass it down along the line. The design of the key itself is unnoted within the Book, but inferences of multiple copies have been made. It is also unknown where the Vault is located, but the Book mentions blueprints as a hint to where more information can be found. These blueprints are said to be hidden within some of Raphael’s most famous paintings when he found solace in art in his old age._

++++

       Blaine tossed down the small pile of documents outlining his ancestor’s life and accomplishments. It worried him to no end how _much_ information the police used to have on his family. Considering the fact that this was with the knowledge that they did not have the Book worried him even more. Luckily, having the book and knowing all the secrets are rather separate concepts. The two did not go together automatically. It was as if his ancestors had the kind of foresight for trouble that led them to hold back on filling the book with _all_ their secrets.

       What possibly annoyed him more than worried him was that even while the police had so much information on his family—including the items _stolen_ from him—they never decided to look into anything. The pens were one thing: they weren’t flaunted in Beiste’s bar, so the police almost _couldn’t_ have known about them to do anything. The paintings, however, were much more inexcusable. Roz had probably hosted dozens of lavish galas: did at any of them, Blaine wonders, the police notice the stolen property?

       At the same time, Blaine recognizes he can’t wholly blame the police for not assuming the legality of people owning his family’s treasures. Part of it might be that they don’t pay much attention to the property people own until it’s brought up to them in a formal setting: with evidence and proof that someone owned it before someone else took it without permission.

       With that in mind, Blaine blinked. Smiling to himself, he figured he could remedy that situation in the future.


End file.
